Chaotic Java

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?

While the Java community celebrates the release of JavaFX 1.0, two JSRs are striving to teach us again how to write Swing applications – this time, the easy way. JSR 295 addresses property manipulations and bindings, not just in the Swing framework but throughout the Java platform; JSR 296 simplifies Java application creation using Swing, bringing a “Swing for the rest of us” kind of approach.

In this post, I’ll discuss JSR 296 and what it brings, and my opinion of where it could be improved; in the followup post I’ll discuss JSR 295, and try to do the same for that. Continue reading »

Recently I took the time to read the early draft of JSR-292, the invokedynamic bytecode specification. For those slightly less familiar with the subject, it makes it possible to perform late binding on method invocations, allowing for calling methods on objects without knowing the object type at compile time. This feature is important for projects such as Jython and JRuby, which provide Java bytecode compilation to the popular Python and Ruby languages.

Continue reading »