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).

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

Java 7 introduced the Method Handles with the java.lang.invoke.MethodHandle and java.lang.invoke.MethodHandles classes.

Read more ...

I have written before (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) on my biased perspective of the most significant developments in softwar

Read more ...

Packt Publishing is offering $5 (USD) e-books when two or more are purchased through 3 January 2013. Their Stock Your Reader for Christmas page contains the details and I have included a snapshot of that here.

Read more ...

One of the many features that makes Groovy an attractive scripting language is its built-in command-line argument support via CliBuilder.

Read more ...

I have looked at some highly useful methods available in Groovy GDK's extensions to the Java JDK in blog posts such as Groovy JDK (GDK): File.deleteDir(), Groovy JDK (GDK): Text File to String,

Read more ...