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.

December 2009

Java EE 6, Glassfish 3 and NetBeans 6.8 Released: Q&A with EE 6 Specification Lead Roberto Chinnici
Following the final approval vote for Java EE 6 last week, Sun has today released the Java EE 6 SDK, GlassFish Version 3 and NetBeans 6.8. InfoQ talks to EE 6 Specification Lead Roberto Chinnici about the significance of EE 6 for enterprise Java developers, key architectural lessons gained from working on the specification, and the future direction of the platform.
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November 2009

JDK 7 Milestone 5 Includes Concurrency and Performance Updates, But Is Not Feature Complete
Sun's Java SE team recently released the Milestone 5 build of JDK 7. This was expected to be a feature complete release of Java 7 but is some way short of that. InfoQ takes a look at what has been added and some of the major features still missing.Sun's Java SE team recently released the Milestone 5 build of JDK 7. This was expected to be a feature complete release of Java 7 but is some way short of that. InfoQ takes a look at what has been added and some of the major features still missing.
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Mark Reinhold on Closures for Java
Following on from last week's surprise announcement at Devoxx that Sun would be adding closures to Java, Mark Reinhold has published a blog entry providing more background to the decision.
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Q&A with Gavin King on the Impact of JSR-299 and Weld 1.0 on Java EE and JBoss
As Red Hat ships Weld, Java EE 6's reference implementation for JSR-299 (Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE), InfoQ talks to specification lead Gavin King about the impact that JSR-299 will have on Java EE 6 and JBoss' products and platforms.
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Java Card 3 Includes Java 6 Support and an Embedded Servlet Container
Joseph Darcy has published Project Coin's final list of approved changes to the Java language for the forthcoming version 7 release.
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October 2009
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.
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Sept 2009
Project Coin Announces Final List of Small Language Changes
Joseph Darcy has published Project Coin's final list of approved changes to the Java language for the forthcoming version 7 release.
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June 2009
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Long plagued by controversy, Sun's attempts to modularise the Java platform saw more positive reactions from the JavaOne crowd.
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Java Servlet 3.0 Specification Reaches Proposed Final Draft
The Servlet 3.0 specification sparked considerable debate last year. We take a look at the proposed final draft to see how the issues have been resolved.
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May 2009
Java Persistence 2.0 Proposed Final Draft
The Java Persistence API version 2.0 has reached the proposed final draft stage. It adds a typesafe API for criteria queries with a corresponding metamodel API, and support for Bean validation.
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April 2009
What will Oracle’s Planned Acquisition of Sun Mean for Java
Whilst Sun Microsystems and Oracle are hailing Oracle’s purchase of Sun as a huge boost for Java many in the community are not so sure, wondering what kind of control Oracle will seek to exert over the platform.
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Sun's Garbage First Collector Largely Eliminates Low Latency/High Throughput Tradeoff
In a recent podcast, James Gosling talked to Danny Coward about the significance of Sun's new Hotspot garbage collector Garbage First for developers of large-scale enterprise systems
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Pruning The Deadwood from Java EE
Java EE 6 begins the process of pruning APIs from the platform, with five likely to get the chop.
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March 2009
Sun's Disagreement With Apache Overshadows Java 7 Announcement
Sun Microsystems have published an updated schedule for JDK 7 along with a list of the approved features, but the ongoing disagreement with Apache over licensing the Java Compatibility Kit (JCK) for Java SE threatens to overshadow the announcement
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February 2009
InfoQ Editors' Recommended Reading List
Members of the InfoQ editorial team discuss a number of books which have influenced how we think about software development, architecture and managing projects.
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  Sun Launches JavaFX Mobile
Sun Microsystems has launched JavaFX mobile today just in time for the mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain next week
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January 2009
Two Type-Safe Criteria API Proposals for JPA 2.0
One of the most significant new features in the forthcoming Java Persistence API 2.0 specification is a type-safe criteria-based query API. There are two alternative proposals under consideration by the JSR-317 Expert Group and the group is seeking feedback from the wider development community.
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Stephen Chin on WidgetFX and JFXtras
Stephen Chin is the lead developer of two open source JavaFX projects: WidgetFX, a desktop widget platform, and JFXtras, a set of add-ons and utilities for developers working with JavaFX Script. He is also co-authoring the forthcoming Pro JavaFX book with Jim Weaver and Weiqi Gao. In this interview he tells us more about these projects and his thoughts on JavaFX.
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