Java is approaching its 20th birthday (initial version was announced on 23 May 1995 at SunWorld) and continues to enjoy advances in terms of the language and platform and in terms of developers' understanding how to use the language and platform most effectively. In this post, I look at some of the recent blog posts on Java that I have found to be particularly useful or interesting.
Last Publicly Available Java 7 Critical Patch Update
Lucian Constantin's Critical Java updates fix 19 vulnerabilities, disable SSL 3.0 states that because "future Java 7 security patches will not be publicly available," users "should migrate to Java 8." Constantin's article summarizes some specific details on the security patches associated with this Critical Patch Update.
Cleaning Up Those Pesky javac lint Warnings
Without careful attention to warnings generated with javac lint, the number of these warnings can become so large on long-term projects that it can be difficult to even notice when new javac lint warnings appear. It can also be daunting to address these when there is an overwhelming number of the warnings present. Joseph D. Darcy's post Advice on removing javac lint warnings describes a detailed approach for working off javac lint warnings in an orderly manner and how to resolve different types of these warnings. The steps of the outlined approach and the approaches to use with different types of warnings are based on Darcy's experiences "fixing and reviewing fixes of javac lint warnings in the JDK 9 code base ... over the last twelve months or so."
Advanced Java Debugging Tips
Tal Weiss's 5 Advanced Java Debugging Techniques Every Developer Should Know About presents ideas with detailed descriptions for improving debugging of Java-based applications. These include improving jstack output by use of explicit thread names; detecting deadlock programatically; using BTrace to get the value of any variable from any point in the code from a live JVM, without attaching a debugger or redeploying code;" and building native JVM agents.
Conclusion
Although Java has been around for almost 20 years, the the platform and the language continue to evolve and advance and developers' insight into using these tools advances with them. The three posts highlighted here are examples of that.
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