Charles is the lead Java Editor for InfoQ.com where he writes regular articles on enterprise software and application development topics. A complete set of his articles can be found here. The below are a small selection of featured pieces.

Oracle and the Java Ecosystem: Oracle is making huge efforts to engage with the wider Java ecosystem, but challenges still remain.

A Discussion With Neal Gafter on the Future of Java: Microsoft's Neal Gafter, who was primary designer and implementer of the Java SE 4 and 5 language enhancements and now works for Microsoft on .NET platform languages, discusses the impact of Oracle's acquisition of Sun on Java,makes the case for adding segmented stacks and a meta-object protocol to Java,, and offers some insights into how Java and C#/.NET compare.

SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer Discusses the Impact of the Cloud on Enterprise IT: This article is a transcript of an interview with SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer, recorded at the inaugural What's Next Conference in Paris in May. Colyer discusses the impact of mobile devices, HTML 5 and cloud-computing on enterprise IT generally, and SpringSource's Cloud Foundary product.

Twitter Shifting More Code to JVM, Citing Performance and Encapsulation As Primary Drivers: While it almost certainly remains the largest Ruby on Rails based site in the world, Twitter has gradually been moving more and more of its stack to the JVM. Last year the company announced that its back-end message queue had been re-written in Scala, and more recently it moved the search stack to Java, making Twitter search around three times faster.

Guardian.co.uk Switching from Java to Scala: Citing a need to be able to respond faster to events, and disappointment in the feature set and timeframe for Java 7, the team behind guardian.co.uk is using Scala as an alternative to Java for their new projects. InfoQ spoke to Web Platform Development Team Lead Graham Tackley about their current stack, the reasons behind the move, and the experience of using Scala in large-scale development.

The Azul Garbage Collector: Azul's recently announced Zing product brings their Garbage Collector, which achieves both pauseless garbage collection and a high tolerance to the factors which typically impact collection and application responsiveness, to Java programs running on Intel and AMD based servers. This article takes a detailed look at how Azul has been able to achieve these design goals.

An Introduction to SpringSource's Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Support: This article looks at the problems AMQP is aiming to address, exploring some of the debate and controversy that the draft specification has generated. We talk to SpringSource's Mark Pollack and Mark Fisher, to find out more about their AMQP-based products, and iMatix's Pieter Hintjens about his work on the specification and his concerns around the direction it has taken.

Catching up with Nuxeo: Switching from Python to Java: Back in 2006 InfoQ covered a story about Nuxeo, an open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) specialist company, who had announced that it was changing its core technology platform from Python to Java. Four years on we caught up with Eric Barroca, CEO at Nuxeo, to find out how that conversion went, and to explore their new technology stack and position in the ECM industry.

JSR 292 and the Multi-lingual JVM: Java 7 is looking to improve support for dynamic languages using the Java Virtual Machine for their runtime environment. John Rose has been leading a project to explore some options, and JSR 292 will standardise some of this work for Java 7. InfoQ takes a look at the problems JSR 292 solves, and talks to JRuby lead Charles Nutter to find out more about InvokeDynamic in practice.

Evolving Java Without Changing the Language: InfoQ examines three techniques for encouraging experimentation with potential new Java language features - DSLs, the annotation processor, and moving the syntactic sugar from the language to the IDE.

InfoQ Editors' Recommended Reading List: We recently had a conversation amongst the InfoQ editorial team about the books we would most recommend to InfoQ readers based on the books that we felt had most influenced us as programmers, architects and managers. Here is the resulting list of sixteen books that we eventually agreed on, plus a few other tips, with comments from the editors who originally suggested them.

Java FX Technology Preview: JavaFX represents a significant shift in the way Sun engages with the Java product market. Rather than focusing solely on the underlying technology, Sun is looking to provide a complete solution for an individual market. With the 1.0 release imminent InfoQ takes a look at the platform and talks to Sun Staff Engineer Joshua Marinacci about the upcoming release.

Interview: Emmanuel Bernard on the Bean Validation specification: Following on from a previous article on the early draft of the Bean Validation framework, InfoQ sat down with Emmanuel Bernard to learn more about the proposal and the community involvement the expert group is seeking.