Some interesting links for and from ##java, Jan 15 2016

Some links relevant to Java, as of Jan 15 2016:

  • A git-flow cheatsheet. git-flow is a set of command-line scripts that implement Vincent Driessen‘s branching model for git projects, such as commands to complete feature requests, and the like.
  • Yahoo has released a giant dataset for machine learning.
  • jQuery has reached 3.0 beta. jQuery may not be the framework du jour for implementing a Javascript front end for Java web applications (Angular.js is, based on anecdata), but it’s still relevant. Lots of little changes, but one big one is that IE 6-8 support is being dropped. Die, Internet Exploder. Die.
  • Azul Systems has published “Four Reasons why Java is still #1“. In short, they are:
    • Practicality
    • Backwards Compatibility
    • Scalability/Performance/Reliability
    • Freshness, largely centering around all of the changes introduced in Java 8.
  • The Hibernate blog published “JPA test case templates“, documenting a set of templates (go figure) to help replicate bugs in tests. Templates exist for the native Hibernate APIs and, obviously, JPA as well. This would be useful for all kinds of test cases – if you have a problem with JPA or Hibernate, consider using one of these to show the problem, even if you’re not using Hibernate – you should be able to change the JPA provider fairly easily if you’re avoiding Hibernate.
  • A set of Java EE 7 sample projects built by the “WASdev” — whom I don’t know, but it looks like they’re the people who gave us Liberty – an Java EE 7 application server built with technology from IBM. Seems like useful stuff, though, and if it’s written properly it’s portable to other Java EE 7 containers.