Chaotic Java

I always wanted to see and know what the people reading the blog actually thought of it.

I do know many come to Chaotic Java from Google, referring to it when needed if CJ has a popular answer on a certain topic. However, I really liked posts like the IDE Wars post, where people started a discussion in the comments area – it was something. That’s why I tried having an IRC day/week – which was fun but attracted only a couple of people.

Today I noticed something called “Google Friends Connect“, which is supposed to be an embedded version of the Open Social platform Google and other companies are developing. Obviously, with my luck, it’s probably going to be replaced in a few weeks with Google Wave, but until then – let’s enjoy a little social moment.

So, for your pleasure, the GFC widget, right here in Chaotic Java! Join through the top bar, comment through the comments widget, and connect (or something!)

[gfc gadget=review width=460px]

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 »