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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One of the flashiest aspects of JavaFX 2 is its animation support. The insightful Creating Transitions and Timeline Animation in JavaFX covers using both Transitions and Timelines in JavaFX 2.

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I eagerly accepted Packt Publishing's invitation to review JBoss AS 7: Configuration, Deployment, and Administration because it has been several years since I last used JBoss and I was curious to learn more about JBoss AS 7.

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I recently needed to check some homework answers related to use of the quadratic formula. After realizing that it was getting tedious to do these by hand, I thought of using my calculator to solve them. However, I realized that I could write a simple application using JavaFX to calculate the results and that approach seemed more interesting than using the calculator.

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The JavaLobby/DZone syndicated version of my blog post Focus on JavaFX 2 FXML with NetBeans 7.1 was recently published and Mihai Dinca-panaitescu (author of DZone article Tuning Your Java VM) added an interesting and useful feedback comment.

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In this blog post, I reference and summarize recent Java-related posts that I have found to be particularly interesting and well worth the time spent reading them.

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Although Oracle's changes to JavaFX at JavaOne 2010 and JavaOne 2011 have converted me from a skeptic to a believer when it comes to

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In October 2011, I used the post Hello JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by NetBeans 7.1 beta to look at using NetBeans 7.1 beta to build a simple Hello, World style of JavaFX 2.0 application.

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Tattletale is a highly useful development tool that not only has a catchy name, but also has a clever slogan: "Betraying your project's naughty little secrets." Tattletale scours JAR files to find various naught little secrets about dependencies, multiple versions, extraneous versions of classes, JARs in multiple locations, and so forth.

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One of the new code hints provided by NetBeans 7.1 is the Unused Assignment hint. A simple code sample that will cause this hint to be displayed in NetBeans 7.1 is shown next.

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One of the "new and noteworthy" features of NetBeans 7.1 is the ability to compare two heap dumps. Specifically, the easy-to-use feature allows one to quickly ascertain the difference in number of each class's instances between two dump files. This brief post shows how easy it is to use.

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