“Good design is as little design as possible. The same goes for code style. Put style where style belongs.” Why JavaFX CSS on the JVM matters right now Java folks have wanted painless styling for years. Swing gets the job done but dressing it up often means more code than…
Year: 2009
Migrating Physical to Virtual: A Checklist
Migrating Physical to Virtual: A Checklist Context for today. VMware just pushed out vSphere and made thin disks and VMXNET3 feel normal. Microsoft is lining up Hyper V with live migration in the next wave. Citrix turned XenServer free. Your racks are still full of 2U boxes, support contracts are…
From Joda-Time to java.time: Finally Growing Up
Dates in Java have been a long weekend of migraines. We have all wrestled with Calendar, SimpleDateFormat, and time zones until the logs looked like static.There is a way out, and it starts with Joda Time and a maturing effort that the platform calls JSR 310, the future home of…
JCreator and Lightweight Workflows
JCreator and lightweight workflows Java is everywhere and this week got even louder with Oracle saying it will buy Sun. In the middle of that noise we still have to ship code. A lot of us bounce between Eclipse and NetBeans, then watch the fan spin while the project indexes….
Why Joomla Took Off in
Make it simple enough that a volunteer can run it, and flexible enough that a pro wants to. a Joomla meetup note scribbled on a napkin Joomla took off last year. If you build sites for real people with real deadlines, you felt it. The phones rang more. Budgets loosened…
Immutable Collections for Safer Concurrency
Your code is not broken. It is just being poked at the same time by two or five threads. These things used to be rare when we had one real core and dreams. Now your laptop ships with two or four cores and your server feels like a small city….
Versioning APIs without Pulling Rugs
Are you about to ship a fresh REST endpoint and feeling that little twitch of fear? Will your next tweak break someone else’s production at three in the morning? How do you do API versioning without pulling rugs from under your users? Why version at all if REST is supposed…
The business of software: Pick Problems That Command a Budget
Software is a business before it is art. If you forget that part, the market will remind you at billing time. Ship something that earns, or you are just funding a hobby with nicer tools. People keep asking what the real lessons are when you try to turn software into…
Oracle Just Bought Sun: What This Means for Java
\n So Oracle just bought Sun. What does that mean for Java? \n\n\n\n First reaction. Breathe. Then ask the only question that matters to most of us who write code in Java every day. What happens to the language and the platform that powers our apps, our servers, and a…
Thread Safety in Servlets: Avoiding Shared State
Thread safety in servlets sounds dry until it costs you a weekend. This is a practitioner’s view on why shared state is a trap, how to avoid it, and how to keep your Java web app sane on Tomcat or Jetty without playing whack a mole with race bugs. The…