I recently had need to reduce the size of a large number of JPG images. I did not want to do this one at a time in a graphics manipulation tool, so scripting seemed like the obvious choice. These days, Groovy is my generally my preferred tool for scripting jobs.

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Both Groovy and Java SE 7 provide improvements for file management in Java as I discussed in posts here, here, here, and

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Neil McAllister's Fatal Exception blog post What I'm thankful for as a developer is timely given the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the United States.

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Guava currently (Release 10) includes four annotations in its com.google.common.annotations package: Beta,

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Three years ago, I wrote about practices that I believe lead to more effective Javadoc in my post More Effective Javadoc. In this post, I look at some familiar projects which provide good examples of effective Javadoc documentation practices. I, of course, will only be covering a very tiny representative sample of the many good projects and many good Javadoc ideas that are out there.

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The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) has announced that the keynote speaker at RMOUG Training Days 2012 will be Cary Millsap of Method R Consulting.

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In a development that seemed destined to happen since IBM's joining OpenJDK, Apache Harmony's Project Management Committee (PMC) has

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In the post Checking for Null or Empty or White Space Only String in Java, I demonstrated common approaches in the Java ecosystem (standard Java, Guava, Apache Commons Lang, and Groovy) for checking whether a String is null, empty, or white space only similar to what C# supports with the

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One of the conveniences of Groovy is the ability to easily perform filtering and transformation operations on collections via Groovy's closure support. Guava brings filtering and transformation on collections to standard Java and that is the subject of this post.

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My general preference is to use immutable classes and collections as often as possible. I have often used the Collections methods for returning unmodifiable collections.

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In the post Dennis Ritchie Day, Tim O’Reilly "declares this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day!" O'Reilly acknowledges that "I don't have the convening power of a Governor Brown" (who declared Sunday, October 16, as Steve Jobs Day), but calls for Dennis Ritchie Day

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Guava's Stopwatch is another Guava class new to Guava Release 10 (as is Optional, the subject of another recent post).

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Guava Release 10 introduces the Optional class, which can be used where one might use a null object. I have built my own classes like this before, but the advantage of Guava's providing it is that it can be easily reused across projects and developers new to an organization might know about it already if they use Guava.

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Tip #5 of my blog post Ten Tips for Using Java Stack Traces demonstrates two example of using Java code to extract a Throwable's (implying Error or Exception) stack trace into a single

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Anyone who's written much Java has probably written methods that begin with conditionals that verify either the provided parameters or the state of the object being acted upon before proceeding with the remainder of the method's implementation. These can add verbosity to the method and sometimes, especially if there are multiple checks, can almost drown out the interesting business logic of the method.

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