Chaotic Java

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 »

Imagining a method which receives as a parameter a type Object instance and needs to perform some action according to its type is not difficult. In fact, there are several design patterns that, when used in combination, help solve just that. However, this post is about adding a new switch..case construct to prevent some boiler-plate caused by these patterns.
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