There's much excitement about JDK 7 and in particular Lambdas! I've waded through the bloat to help you get an understanding of it. If you search for JDK 7 in your favourite search engine the chances are you'll hit the controversies surrounding lambadas in Java fairly early on in your hunt. It's a contentious subject, which means it's getting a lot of attention from a lot of clever people,...

Project committer Stuart Halloway just announced the launch of the first release candidate for Clojure 1.2.  Although there have been few changes between this release and the last, the news is significant because the first beta of Clojure 1.2 went live only two weeks ago.  They only had one beta release and they may only have one release candidate as well.  Expect the GA very soon.JBoss...

One blog topic that never seems to get old is what makes a good programmer, or how to be a good programmer, or what you can do to be a better programmer. The same activities are often listed as being the path to successful codesmithing, when really it is just the method by which the true magic happens. With programming, like many things, it isn’t what you do, it’s what you learn from it...

The more I think about it, the less I understand the point in Scala’s Option class (which originated in Haskell under the name Maybe). If you read the voluminous material that describes the concepts behind the Option class, there are two main benefits: It saves you from NullPointerException It allows you to tell whether null means “no object” or “an object whose value is null” I claim...

DataValve is a free open source library that facilitates the creation of re-usable view and data access components as well as providing a number of features for pagination, sorting and parameterizing queries. This article defines the problems DataValve aims to solve and how it solves them. James Sugrue

I’ve just come back from three days in Santa Clara, spending time with some of the brightest people in the Java world - the JVM language summit is truly a fantastic collection of great people. And I was there too… James Sugrue

Some interesting statistics came out of the GUADEC conference this week, and with them, a fiery condemnation blog by former Red Hat employee Greg DeKoenigsberg.

The fourth JBoss Application Server 6.0 milestone was released this week.  It is the first to include support for EJB 3.1 Timer Service and EJB 3.1 Asynchronous invocations. M4 also comes with a different default JBossWS stack that uses Apache CXF.  With this support, users will immediately get better performance for WS-*.Objectivity Ships its New GraphDB

This article is about how to configure Apache Tomcat 6 or 7 to use OpenWebBeans based dependency injection. What is Apache  OpenWebBeans? OpenWebBeans is an ASL 2.0-licensed implementation of the JSR-299, Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform. Project's web page can be found at, "http://openwebbeans.apache.org"

Before the Oracle acquisition, Sun was contributing three servers to the build farm for the PostgreSQL project to test updates and ensure stability on Solaris.  Even though PostgreSQL was technically a competitor to Sun's MySQL, the company still supported development of the project and contributed DTrace support and other features to the platform.  This week, Oracle pulled the plug on those...

The release of IntelliJ IDEA 9.0 last year brought a flurry of extra excitement with JetBrains' announcement that there would also be a FOSS Community Edition with the release.  Although there's no major announcements on the open source front, the next release of IntelliJ IDEA looks like its going to raise the bar for the major IDEs.  

This first set of tips is from:Baishampayan Ghose Find him on Twitter. His GitHub a/c.It’s hard to pin point a few good tips because Clojure can do so many things in very nice and ingenious ways, that it’s not even funny. Anyway, here are a few: Tip #1: Sort a map on multiple keys:References Reference:  Clojure Tips from the Experts ...

We are staying in front of new world - all major browsers either support already or plan to support in next major version HTML5 (not in scope of this article) & WebSockets (main subject of the article). In 6 to 9 months we as application developers will have in our hands extremely powerful client side tools to build new generation of the Web. But are we ready on server side? And if not, what...

JSF with Seam and JPA is quite a powerful combination. However, you still have to be aware of many nuances. I plan to share some of these, starting with a lazy-load exception that is quite strange at first sight.

The Apache Software Foundation Blog recently began running a new feature entitled "The ASF Asks", intended to hep raise awareness of some of the Foundation's many projects. A couple of weeks ago, the blog highlighted the Pivot project in an entry called "The ASF Asks: Have you met Apache Pivot?".

Following the recommendations of Corey Haines, Michael Guterl, James Martin and James Sugrue

I’m currently in the process of implementing Seph, and I’ve reached an inflection point. This point is the last responsible moment to choose what I will target with my language. Seph will definitely be a JVM language, but after that there is a range of options - some quite unlikely, some more likely. The valid choices are: James Sugrue ...

REST Web Services can be particularly difficult to test, with the need for networking, a web container, multiple threads and transaction management creating extra complexity beyond your standard unit test. In this article I demonstrate patterns designed to address this complexity while enabling complete testing of your REST web service stack.The ideal web service unit test will use the same...

Today is a very exciting and important day for the Eclipse community.  The Eclipse Platform project has released Eclipse SDK 4.0, the next generation of the Eclipse platform.  For technical perspective on the release I point you to Mike Wilson’s excellentt blog post ‘Growing the future’. James Sugrue

Today's Early Adoption release of Eclipse 4.0 (e4) was almost called a 1.0 release (apparently the 4.0 isn't enough :)  ), but since e4 is still an incubator, they couldn't call it a 1.0 release, even though the release last year was 0.9.  They had to have a release number to put on all the files,  so they decided to make it 0.10.0.  Eclipse 4 is the next generation IDE for the Eclipse...