If you consider yourself a well-rounded Java programmer you know threads. You must also know or heard about threads in Java 5. Or, the overhaul of threads in this version (and Java 6). This is a complicated topic but whether you like it or not, you must update your skills and learn about concurrent programming…

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Java 5 SE, in my opinion was a great release. While reading a blog post, Java 5 – The Gems and the Duds, the author gives thumbs up to the concurrency package, generics, CachedRowSet, and annotations; he gives thumbs down to autoboxing. And he’s not sure about varargs and enums. Very good post. I generally…

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Are you using them? I only found out about them recently — they’ve been available since JDK 1.4. I think they’re vastly underutilized…. But they can be really helpful in debugging situations and don’t incur any performance hit. You can enable them in your JDK by adding “-enableassertions” to default VM arguments (type “jre” in…

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Java 6 is around the corner. One of its most exciting features is scripting, I think. There are two sides to it: client-side scripting, and web scripting (I’d like to see an example), as explained by the author of the article below. Examples of client-side scripting are in the article, Scripting for the Java Platform.…

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I came across a good list of tools (most of them Eclipse plugins) that provide reports based on your source code. All free. Cobertura is a code coverage tool that looks very similar to Clover (which costs a lot) and it’s free. This list is taken from an article by Mike Clark on StickyMinds. PMD:…

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If you’ve been working with Spring MVC, you already know this. Whenever you create a new Controller you end up injecting the services or DAOs (if you’re not using the service layer) that you’re going to use. It gets to be a little cumbersome and repetitive. It could be improved. How? By defining a Spring…

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What is JavaServer Faces? Do you know what Struts is? No? Then you must have been on a vacation for a while, huh? Anyway, Struts and JSF are competing technologies. They’re basically implementations of MVC (you have to know Model View Controller). I’ve done several examples with Struts and I must say that it’s OK.…

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Did you know that you could write a JSP tag without writing a single line of Java code? I didn’t. I was surprised today when I discovered that. I’m going to show you how easy it is. Let’s take an anchor tag (<a href=””>link</a>). If you don’t get to write it very often, you might…

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Do you think J2EE is complex? Do you think having many different frameworks, different APIs, and many different specifications help or hurt it? Do you think not having a single, one-way avenue for an inexperienced developer helps? I don’t. In this article, Simplifying Complexities of J2EE, Debu Panda gives you several arguments why J2EE should…

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Are you looking to learn J2EE? J2EE Learning Guide is a collection of links to J2EE articles, tutorials, books, products, and more. I got this link today from del.icio.us/tag/j2ee . It’s amazing how many different links are on this site. Take a look and enjoy.

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