Most professional software developers these days understand the importance and value of writing and using unit tests.

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This post references some of the recent blog posts and articles that have interested me. Topics include Java-specific topics such as Java EE, JavaFX, Scala, and Gradle as well as more general software development topics such as software patents and open source.

Why Software Patents are Evil

Simon Phipps summarizes in Why software patents are evil why patents in software may not make sense:

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I have blogged before on the handy Apache Commons ToStringBuilder and I was recently asked what the seemingly cryptic text appearing in the generated String output constitutes. The colleague asking the question correctly surmised that what he was looking at was a hash code, but it did not match his instance's hash code.

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Typesafe issued a press release today including this initial paragraph:

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The JavaOne 2012 Call for Papers has been issued. The window for submission is March 14 through April 9. Notifications regarding accepted and declined proposals will be made in late May or early June and speakers whose proposals are accepted are expected to confirm their session by the middle of June. JavaOne 2012 is September 30 through October 4, 2012, in San Francisco, California.

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The current Java.net poll question is, "How critical is it for JSR-310 (new Date and Time API) to be implemented in Java 8?" At the time of my writing of this post, nearly 150 respondents have voted and an overwhelming percentage have answered either "Very" (53%) or "It would be nice, but we can get by using the current classes" (22%).

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I was first exposed to Java after several years of C++ experience and so it seemed natural when I learned that Java does not allow method overloading based on return type.

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A recent reddit Java thread is titled "Share a useful class from the standard Java Class Library!" and starts with the comment, "There are so many available classes and sometimes ones exist that you don't realize. Share one that you use that the rest of us may not be aware of!" In this post, I look at some of the (mostly JDK) classes mentioned in the forty (at time of this writing) responses to this request.

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The JavaFX 2 class javafx.scene.paint.Color includes several fields that are static Color members. I have taken advantage of the convenience of these publicly available static fields in many of my JavaFX 2 examples shown in this blog.

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This post summarizes and provides links to some online resources related to software development that have recently captured my attention. Topics include Linux, DevOps, dynamic typing versus static typing, abstraction versus simplicity, and cloud computing.

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The book Java Reflection in Action was published in 2004, but remains largely applicable eight years later. In this post, I review this book and cover its strengths and its weaknesses. In general, age is the common theme of most of its weaknesses, but I was surprised at how relevant its information still is.

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There are several sites (Java.net, JavaWorld, JavaLobby/DZone, Java reddit, and Java Code Geeks) that I like to browse for the latest Java news. These sites are great and bring the best from around the web from the wider Java community.

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I decided to have a simple JavaFX 2 animated sample running as attendees entered the room for my RMOUG Training Days 2012 presentation. The desired result was achieved as attendees asked if how the running application was implemented. More than one person was surprised that it was implemented in "pure Java" without Flash or HTML5. I provide the source code for this simple example along with some screen snapshots in this post.

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I presented "JavaFX 2.0: Java in the Rich Internet Application Space" at RMOUG Training Days 2012 earlier this week. After many years of presenting at technical conferences, I've decided that one of the best indicators of how well I did in my presentation is the types of questions I get from attendees.

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Optimus Prime's post IceFaces Copies PrimeFaces Line by Line and Brian McKinney's response (New ACE Component Origins) have led to a controversial discussion on the blogosphere regarding legalities and ethics in an open source context.

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