Recent Java-Related Posts Worthy of Special Notice

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.

JDK 8 and Unsigned Integer Arithmetic

Joe Darcy's post Unsigned Integer Arithmetic API now in JDK 8 states that "initial API support for unsigned integer arithmetic" has been pushed into Java 8. Darcy explains that this is implemented largely via static methods on classes java.lang.Integer and java.lang.Long.

Although Darcy's post is not very long, he manages to talk about the specific unsigned arithmetic functionality that is supported (conversion of Strings to unsigned integers, conversion of unsigned integers to Strings, comparing unsigned values, and calculation of unsigned division and remainder) as well as why it was decided to not implement new types such as UnsignedInt. A consequence of not implementing specific unsigned types is that it is easier to inadvertently mix signed and unsigned values and Darcy suggests some ideas built on naming conventions or new built-in annotations to address this concern.

Versions, Code Names, and Features of Java Releases

Speaking of new versions of Java, another Joe (Joseph Kulandai) started 2012 off with a nice post on Java Versions, Features and History. In this post, Kulandai lists the versions of Java in backwards chronological order (Java SE 7 listed first and JDK Version 1.0 at the bottom of the post). Under each major version of Java, Kulandai provides bullet lists of new features in that release and provides the code name of each release.

Java 8 Status Updates

Continuing the theme of Java 8 updates, another post of interest is Johannes Thönes's Java 8 Status Updates. This post looks at the status of "the two big new language features of the upcoming Java SE 8" (Project Lambda and Project Jigsaw).

Java 7 Concurrency

Niklas Schlimm has written two recent posts on using Java 7 concurrency features. He introduces "a flexible thread synchronization mechanism called Phaser" in the post Java 7: Understanding the Phaser and looks in detail at ThreadLocalRandom in the post Java 7: How to write really fast Java code.

OutOfMemoryError: Using Command-line Tools

Vladimir Šor's Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 5) - JDK Tools is, as its title suggests, the fifth in a series on Java memory issues available on that blog ("Solving OutOfMemoryError blog post series"). This post provides a brief summary description and usage information for three command-line tools bundled with the Oracle Java SDK (jps, jmap, and jhat).

The previous entries in this series are written by Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovski: Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 1) - story of a developer, Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 2)- why didn’t operations solve it?, Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 3) - where do you start?, and Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 4) - memory profilers.

Debugging the JVM

Attila Balazs's post Debugging the JVM provides interesting insight on something that we don't seem to have to do as often these days as in the earlier days of the JVM, but could be a very useful resource on the occasions this does occur. Balazs talks about "crashing the JVM itself" via null thread group name and then goes onto explain using gdb in Linux to debug the issue with the JVM.

Groovy Introduction

Alex's post provides an introduction to Groovy including coverage of XML with Groovy, regular expressions with Groovy, and SQL with Groovy.

A New Java Blog With Two JavaFX Posts

I've posted before on why more developers should write blogs. One of the reasons is the variety of opinions and ideas that are generated that way. With this in mind, I have been interested to read the first two posts of new blog Experiments with Java. Both of the blog's current posts have been written in January 2012 and are on JavaFX 2. The posts are Percent Width for TableColumn in JavaFX 2.x TableView and Sliding in JavaFX (It’s all about clipping).

Conclusion

There have been several good Java-related posts in recent weeks and a sample of them are highlighted in this post.