The Apache Foundation has announced the release of PDFBox 2.0. Apache PDFBox allows for the “creation of new PDF documents, manipulation, rendering, signing of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents.”
TechEmpower‘s Web Framework Benchmarks features Rapidoid as the fastest web framework – and Rapidoid is written in Java. It’s worth noting that the benchmark, being a benchmark, isn’t exactly “real world” – and Rapidoid doesn’t win every category – but it’s still pretty impressive to see Java, with it’s (ancient and outmoded) reputation for lack of speed, featuring so highly here.
Chronicle Map is, according to the project site, an in-memory key-value store designed for low-latency and/or multi-process applications. Notably trading, financial market applications. Looks interesting – there are plenty of distributed key/value stores around, it might be interesting to see how this one compares to things like Apache Ignite, GigaSpaces’ community edition, Oracle Coherence, Terracotta DSO, and other such candidates.
Markov Chains explains, well, markov chains. Basically, markov chains are a state transition method that predicts the “next state” using probabilities – you can build conversations using markov chains to predict likely responses. (For example, “vote Trump for President” has likely responses of “Gosh, why” or “heck yeah, let’s build us a wall!”) The reference link is actually a really nice explanation.