Articles

Articles

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 pices

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.

November 2008
JavaFX Technology Preview
InfoQ takes a look at the JavaFX preview release and talks to Sun Staff Engineer Joshua Marinacci about version 1 expected this autumn.
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June 2008
JSR-305: Annotations for Software Defect Detection
Bill Pugh, the creator of FindBugs, is leading the work on JSR-305 which aims to introduce a set of standard annotations for software defect detection.
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JavaOne: Cliff Click on a Scalable Non-Blocking Coding Style
Dr Cliff Click, a distinguished engineer at Azul Systems, gave a talk at this year's JavaOne about a scalable, non-blocking coding style in Java. The coding style has allowed him to build several lock-free data structures in Java that successfully scale on processors with hundreds of cores.
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May 2008
Servlet 3.0 Features Spark Debate
The draft specification of JSR-315 (Servlet 3.0) is now available and introduces a number of new features including asynchronous/Comet support, security improvements, and other ease of development features such additional annotations and web.xml fragments. With some of the new features generating considerable debate, the expert group are actively seeking community feedback.
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Java 6 Hotspot Performance
John Rose, a key designer behind Sun's new Da Vinci Machine project initiative, and Charles Nutter of the JRuby project, contrast dynamic language support and optimization on the JVM and Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime.
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April 2008
Interview: Emmanuel Bernard on the Bean Validation specification
InfoQ sat down with Emmanuel Bernard to learn more about Bean Validation framework and the community involvement the expert group is seeking.
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Initial Draft of the Bean Validation Specification Released
JSR 303, the Bean Validation framework, provides an annotation-based API through which developers can express constraints on JavaBeans. An early draft of the specification is now available for review.
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March 2008
Sun's Java iPhone Port Faces Obstacles
Eric Klein, Vice President of Java Marketing, has announced Sun's intention to port the JVM to the iPhone, but multiple obstacles need to be overcome.
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Planned Features For EJB 3.1
The EJB 3.1 expert group recently released an early draft of the specification, containing some significant new features as well as a continued simplification of the EJB programming model.
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February 2008
Dynamic Languages on the CLR and JVM
John Rose, a key designer behind Sun's new Da Vinci Machine project initiative, and Charles Nutter of the JRuby project, contrast dynamic language support and optimization on the JVM and Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime.
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January 2008
A Look at the First HTML 5 Working Draft
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a draft of the HTML 5 specification, which reflects the changing nature of the web since HTML 4 was released more than 10 years ago.
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Amazon EC2 Gains Favor with JEE and Groovy Developers
Using the EC2 API is straightforward, but to make life even simpler Chris Richardson has posted a Groovy framework that can launch MySQL, Apache HTTP Server, a set of Tomcat instances and JMeter, as well as deploying web applications to Amazon's EC2.
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JEE 6: Extensibility, Profiles and Pruning
Whilst the public details are still a little sketchy, the general direction of Java EE 6 is becoming apparent and reflects the changing role of the Java EE standard.
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