Multicore: New chips mean new challenges
As multicore processors become more prominent, developers need all the support they can get. Infoworld's Paul Krill reports on how Intel, Sun, and Microsoft are approaching Multicore.
Paul Krill, November 2008

Web development with Wicket, Part 3: Many ways to persist
Wicket's fierce independence leaves you with lots of options for persisting your data. Find out how Wicket makes the marriage work, whether you want to settle down with Spring/Hibernate or live on the edge with Databinder and ActiveObjects.
Nathan Hamblen, September 2008

Vendors leading the race on multicore
Hardware vendors are way ahead of developers on multicore, but times are changing.
Tom Kaneshige, August 2008

Four harmful Java idioms, and how to fix them
John O'Hanley reveals the fault lines of four widespread Java idioms, then tickles our brains with new ideas about optimizing Java code for maintainability.
John O'Hanley, July 2008

JRuby 1.1 released
Second major project release features performance improvements, a re-factored IO implementation, and improved memory consumption.
Paul Krill, April 2008

Ajax on the network side
Ajax programming is just one piece of bringing more dynamic, responsive Web applications to your users. Ajax expert Thomas A. Powell fills in the blanks for the network admins who oversee the performance and security of your Ajax apps.
Thomas A. Powell, March 2008

JEOPARD to leverage multicore for real-time
The Open Group has partnered with a consortium of European real-time technology developers, industrial manufacturers, universities, and research organizations to build a framework for Java-based, real-time applications on modern multicore chips and parallel processor systems.
Paul Krill, February 2008

Book excerpt: Executing tasks in threads
Learn how to execute tasks in threads in this excerpt from Java Concurrency in Practice (Brian Goetz et al. (Addison Wesley Professional, May 2006)). The authors present the Executor interface as the basis for a flexible and powerful framework for asynchronous task execution that supports a wide variety of task execution policies.
Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes and Doug Lea, September 2006

Is your code ready for the next wave in commodity computing?
We are standing on the cusp of a real sea change in commodity hardware architectures—the move away from individual processing units that run at high speeds and temperatures to a team of connected units that individually (now at least) are less powerful, but make up for that several times over in sheer numbers. This shift is pervasive, from Unix servers to game consoles. Read on as Humphrey Sheil maps out the history of parallelism, examines the current hardware offerings from the main vendors, looks at some of the seminal software theory, and identifies the strong and weak areas of the Java platform as they relate to parallelism.
Humphrey Sheil, July 2006

Build application search features modeled on Web searches
Building search features in applications modeled on Web searches provides users with a familiar and intuitive search interface. It keeps the user interface for searching simple and consistent across the application. This article presents a framework that can be used to develop simple yet powerful and extensible searching functionality in applications, more specifically, database-driven applications.
Suneel Parthasarathy, March 2005

Pool resources using Apache's Commons Pool Framework
Resource pooling is not new and is being widely used to conserve and optimize the usage of resources like threads, sockets, and database connections. Web server implementations routinely use thread pool implementations for performance and scalability reasons. Commons Pool, from the Apache Software Foundation, may not be the first when it comes to implementation, but it deserves its own place for defining a framework that allows any arbitrary object to be pooled. This article discusses Commons Pool and shows how to use it to implement a thread pool.
Murali Kosaraju, January 2005

Write thread-safe servlets
You finished your Web application, thoroughly tested it, and it's now deployed. You're feeling bullet proof and 10-feet tall, and then it happens...the customer-support calls start coming in: "We're seeing some strange things. A customer is seeing someone else's information!" As your professional career flashes before your eyes, you scan for any possible scenarios that you may have missed. "Did I test it under load? Could that make a difference? I haven't run into this kind of problem before. Why now?" Well, if you're a Java programmer and developing Web applications, then thread safety is an issue you must contend with regardless of your application type or project size. Your servlet and JavaServer Pages code is subject to thread safety issues due to the way your servlet container uses it. This article presents thread safety in simple terms and explains why it can be an issue for your servlets. You also learn how to avoid writing non-thread-safe servlets and how to make servlets thread-safe.
Phillip Bridgham, July 2004

Customize SwingWorker to improve Swing GUIs
The presentation layer of Swing-based applications mainly consists of event-handling logic, layout properties, and graphical user interface (GUI) components. While such code should be easy to program because of the Swing programming model's single-threaded nature, more complicated concurrent constructs such as SwingWorker are often needed to perform time-consuming tasks while preserving screen liveliness. In this article, Yexin Chen discusses some negative consequences caused by SwingWorker usage and illustrates how to customize SwingWorker to achieve additional architectural design goals.
Yexin Chen, June 2003

Simply Singleton
Sometimes it's appropriate to have exactly one instance of a class: window managers, print spoolers, and filesystems are prototypical examples. Typically, those types of objects—known as singletons—are accessed by disparate objects throughout a software system, and therefore require a global point of access. Of course, just when you're certain you will never need more than one instance, it's a good bet you'll change your mind.
David Geary, April 2003

The thread threat
February 14, 2003
Vladimir Roubtsov, February 2003

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Java: A platform for platforms
Sun's reorg may seem promising to shareholders but it's also a scramble for position. The question now is whether Sun can, or wants to, maintain its hold on Java technology. Especially with enterprise leaders like SpringSource and RedHat investing heavily in Java's future as a platform for platforms

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