Chaotic Java

After not touching the yielder project for a long time, I decided to go back and make the change I knew I needed but feared of doing: changing from the visitor model to the tree model of ASM.

It wasn’t even about performance anymore, as I was sure that the performance would be just as great. It was about needing to rethink the entire model again, and about being lazy.

Laziness is the end of all home-made projects, indeed.

Enough rants. I made the change, and now all the problems the previous version used to have – such as methods not necessarily working in a yield clause etc, are working.

Please, read all about it here, and get it from the Google Code project here. And obviously, let me know how it works for you, either in comments or on the issues page, here.

Thanks!

It’s called garbage collection, not resource collection!

Java’s garbage collector has made life so easy for us developers that we sometimes confuse between deleting a reference, i.e. a task the GC does, and releasing a resource – a task the GC doesn’t do. That’s because the GC does something else for us called object finalization, where resources usually clean themselves up.

When I say resources, just think of input/output streams, readers/writers, channels, JDBC, JMS.. the list could go on and on. I almost expect to see code such as: Continue reading »

Recently we switched from Log4J to the java.util.logger package (for this entry it will be called the “Java Logger”). Why, you might wonder, and I don’t have a good reason to give other than the illusion the Java Logger package gives as being more standard. I would like to stress the word illusion for a minute here.

Since the title ruins any chance for a surprise ending, I will be brief, but give a few points about the tools I used. The starting point was that the entire back-end system slowed down significantly; no exceptions found in the logs, nothing stopped working, everything just got 20-40 times slower. So, what can be done?