There was a time when the use of the word ain't was widely considered unacceptable, at least in polite society. Indeed, at that time (and perhaps still today), many people did (and do) not consider ain't to be a real word.

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A new constructor and two new methods were added to the Throwable class (parent of Exception and Error classes) in JDK 7. The new constructor and two new methods were added to support "suppressed exceptions" (not to be confused with the bad practice of swallowing or ignoring exceptions).

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The java.util.Currency class has been available since JDK 1.4, but JDK 7 has provided some useful new methods at the class and instance level. I look at these new methods in this post.

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In the post Impact of Demise of GeoCities on Online Software Development References, I discussed the potential loss of intellectual assets with the shuttering of GeoCities. More intellectual assets may be lost with the impending shuttering of Google's Knol.

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In the post Seven Indispensable NetBeans Java Hints, I talked about using NetBeans hints in general and then focused on seven hints in particular. The seven hints emphasized in that post are listed next:

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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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