As you have have already noticed, the JCP Early Draft specification of JSR 294 is now available for download from the JSR page.... more »

It used to be a real pain to install Java on most versions of Linux, but now that Sun has modified the license, there are some easier ways to install Java. ... more »

Practical JRuby on Rails shows how JRuby brings Java's full-featured API to Ruby and Rails' ease of use in creating applications. These chapters introduce a simple shopping application, deployed in the JVM.... more »

Having introduced SwingLabs' JXMapViewer and JXMapKit in a previous article, Joshua Marinacci puts these components to work by showing how you can bring in geographic data from external sources and use Painters to create custom geodata GUIs.... more »

I am glad to say that in most cases, I do not write a persistence.xml file any more. No, I am not using any IDE to generate it for me, nor has the spec relaxed any requirement. We will discuss some other time why persistence.xml is a necessary evil. Then what has changed? Well, my compiler creates it for me - yes, I said javac creates it for me. When I execute javac -d . -classpath ... FooEntity.java BarEntity.java Main.java... more »

I've bumped into consistent hashing a couple of times lately. The paper that introduced the idea (Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Distributed Caching Protocols for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web by David Karger et al) appeared ten years ago, although recently it seems the idea has quietly been finding its way into more and more services, from Amazon's Dynamo to memcached (courtesy of Last.fm). So what is consistent hashing and why should you care?... more »

It is now possible to configure Spring's dependency injection with annotations. This means that annotations can be used in Spring to mark fields, methods and classes that need dependency injection. Spring also supports auto-wiring of the bean dependencies, that is, resolving the collaborating beans by inspecting the contents of the BeanFactory. Now there are annotations that can be used to indicate fields that are to be auto-wired. Furthermore, auto-detection of annotated components in the classpath is also supported now. When these capabilities are combined, the amount of configuration and dependency mapping in the Spring configuration files is reduced drastically.... more »

Web 2.0 applications developed using standard Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE)-based approaches face serious performance and scalability problems. The reason is that many principles that underlie the Java EE platform's design especially, the use of synchronous APIs don't apply to the requirements of Web 2.0 solutions. This article explains the disparity between the Java EE and Web 2.0 approaches, explores the benefits of asynchronous designs, and evaluates some solutions for developing asynchronous Web applications with the Java platform.... more »

The Closures for Java prototype now allows a closure to access mutated local variables from an enclosing scope. You can download the prototype here. You can also download the sources for the rewritten parts of Doug Lea's fork-join library, ported to use function types. It is a good example of how APIs can be affected by these language changes. Personally, I find the API simplifications to be quite compelling. If you're on the fence about function types, I recommend you have a look. Any feedback you may have is most welcome!... more »

I've just installed Fedora 8 on my ThinkPad X60, and as it comes with packages for Iced Tea (Red Hat's version of OpenJDK), I thought I would take the Seam Booking Example out for a spin.... more »