Chaotic Java

The Garbage Collection set of posts (Generations, Parallel and Concurrent, Tips and Memory Leaks) are ones that I am personally very proud of. First, they were very interesting to write, as the material is extremely interesting; second, a lot of people seemed to enjoy them, and found interest in reading them; and third, it seems that the first post was the most read post in the blog since November ’07, and that’s even more remarkable when considering that the post was published on December!

Because of the last reason, which showed me how much people love the garbage collection subject, I’ve asked my sister to draw a little comic panel discussing the issue. I find it amusing; my sister’s partner found it tragic. I wonder what you think of it!
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So, let’s de-annonymize ourselves! I invite everyone who reads this (and those who don’t but I don’t see how they’ll know otherwise… ) to join me on IRC in server irc.freenode.net, channel #chaoticjava (direct link) .

My virtual existence will be there for the entire next week (starting today), and I will try to be behind the keyboard and type a few words of wisdom most of the time, providing that there’ll be someone to listen. The main point of this is to get some real, live feedback from whoever’s reading this blog. Maybe you have suggestions, ideas for topics you’d want to see covered, or complaints you want to give in person (or the closest option to that). Since I’m not going to publish my email, and sometimes people find it uncomfortable leaving a comment on a blog, I’ve decided to try out this IRC idea.

(Somehow I get the feeling that I’ll be there all alone in that IRC room…)

A week ago, Michael Barker wrote a use case for yielder, where he uses the yielding ability to implement “Mini-Axon”, the Kamaelia learning experience usually done in Python, where generators are a built-in feature of the language. I thought it was good to mention it here, to show how yielder can be used for more than just an easy way to implement iterators – for example, to yield results of processing requests as soon as they arrive at the processing box, in the case of Mini-Axon.

Also, if you have downloaded Yielder in the past, go and download the new version which sports two new main features, one of allowing hierarchies under the Yielder class (before, your implementation had to be a direct subclass) and the second is not using debugging information at all, making the tool work with any environment as it relies solely on the bytecode itself. (If you never downloaded yielder, what are you waiting for?)