GlassFish 3 supports multiple methods of monitoring and management. In this post, I look briefly at the approaches GlassFish provides for administration, monitoring, and management.

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I recently posted Recent Java 8 News, summarizing some of the recent developments in Java 8. In less than a week since publishing that post, several more significant Java news stories have come out and I summarize some of these in this post. Common themes include different Java SE 6 implementations and OpenJDK.

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Java 8 developments are starting to dominate the news again. Recent posts cover extending Milestone 7 of JDK 8 to ensure its feature complete, the Date/Time API now available in Java 8, and updates to the Java Tutorials to cover some Java 8 features.

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In previous blog posts I have looked at Searching JAR Files with Groovy to find entries (such as .class files) contained in the JAR and Viewing a JAR's Manifest File with Groovy. In this post, I look at using Groovy to find a particular property in a properties file contained within a JAR.

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I find myself using analogies (or the closely related similes and metaphors) to illustrate points I am trying to make in various facets of software development, especially when talking with someone new to or less familiar with software development.

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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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