I was only able to attend a portion of Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) Training Days 2013, but this was my 13th year to attend all or part of this conference (and my 11th year presenting). I have always enjoyed meeting and talking to the people who attend even as my interests have diverged somewhat from the database-focus that formerly aligned so well for me with the conference.

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JavaFX provides certain colors by default when rendering charts. There are situations, however, when one wants to customize these colors. In this blog post I look at changing the colors of a JavaFX pie chart using an example I intend to include in my presentation this afternoon at RMOUG Training Days 2013.

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There has been big news recently in the world of JavaFX regarding many more components of JavaFX being open sourced as advertised at

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GroovyFX brings together two of my favorite things: Groovy and JavaFX. The main GroovyFX Project page describes GroovyFX as "[providing] a Groovy binding for JavaFX 2.0." GroovyFX is further described on that page:

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Apache Camel is described on its main web page (and in the Camel User Guide) as "a versatile open-source integration framework based on known Enterprise Integration Patterns." The Camel framework is based on the book Enterprise Integration Patterns and provides implementations of the patterns described in

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One of my favorite features of JavaFX 2 is the standard charts it provides in its javafx.scene.chart package. This package provides several different types of charts out-of-the-box. All but one of these (the PieChart) are "2 axis charts" (specific implementations of the XYChart).

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I recently identified software security issues (#2), especially related to Java, as one of the most significant software development themes of 2012. Not even a month into 2013, a news story receiving a lot of press is the U.S.

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The Hamcrest 1.3 Javadoc documentation for the Matchers class adds more documentation for several of that class's methods than were available in Hamcrest 1.2. For example, the four overloaded contains methods have more descriptive Javadoc documentation as shown in the two comparison screen snapshots shown next.

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I recently accepted an invitation to provide a review of a relatively recently released (publication date is listed as November 2012) Packt Publishing book called GateIn Cookbook. This book is, as its name implies, about the JBoss/eXo collaborative GateIn Portal.

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I recently read in a book on a Java-based technology that one can determine if the JDK is installed by running java -version and looking for the the Strings "Client" or "Server" in the output of the version command. The authors of that book state that the presence of "Server VM" means the JDK is installed and the presence of "Client VM" means that the JDK is not installed (presumably implying that the JRE only is present because something is returned). Unfortunately, that is not a sufficient way to determine presence of the JDK.

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Java 7 introduced the Method Handles with the java.lang.invoke.MethodHandle and java.lang.invoke.MethodHandles classes.

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I have written before (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) on my biased perspective of the most significant developments in softwar

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Packt Publishing is offering $5 (USD) e-books when two or more are purchased through 3 January 2013. Their Stock Your Reader for Christmas page contains the details and I have included a snapshot of that here.

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One of the many features that makes Groovy an attractive scripting language is its built-in command-line argument support via CliBuilder.

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I have looked at some highly useful methods available in Groovy GDK's extensions to the Java JDK in blog posts such as Groovy JDK (GDK): File.deleteDir(), Groovy JDK (GDK): Text File to String,

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