Tag: date parsing

• Natty is a natural language date parser written in Java. The idea is that you feed it corpora like "1984/04/02", "february twenty-eighth", or "3 days from now", and get back a list of potential matching Date objects. It is not designed to pull dates out of natural language – for that you’d want something like OpenNLP – but it might be able to help convert the natural language dates you get from OpenNLP into Java’s Date representations.
• Scriptus is a Maven plugin that writes the Git version into build properties. It’s not entirely well-documented, but that’s what open source might be able to fix, right?
• In When Interviews Fail, Ted Neward deconstructs a DZone article (“Can You Call Non-Static Method From a Static?“). It’s not difficult to imagine the activity – after all, this site does it to authors all the time! – but Ted’s especially good at it. In this case, he’s actually trying to dig at the purpose of an interview in the first place – and closes with “what do you really interview for?”, because if you’re interviewing for some grunt who can answer the corner cases, that’s… all you’re going to get.
• The jOOQ blog asks: “Would We Still Criticise Checked Exceptions, If Java had a Better try-catch Syntax?” History says that yes, people would criticize Java for pretty much anything they can think of, and a few things they can’t. But in this case, it’s talking about potential syntax where the try is optional. It’s not present in a real compiler, and it does have some syntactic clarity to it – but in this author’s opinion, it’s actually hiding some pretty important information (namely, that you’re entering a try/catch block, which is pretty relevant information.)
• From DZone: Properly Shutting Down An ExecutorService shows us a Spring bean to manage an ExecutorService shutdown. This, in itself, is a good thing. However, the interesting thing is that he wrote this because Tomcat was failing to kill the ExecutorService itself – he’s basically illustrated why doing thread management in a web application is a bad idea. Let the container manage the threads, people. (This has always been in the specification – the apps are not supposed to start threads. Ever. Use message-driven beans, or timers, or a ManagedExecutorService.)

BTW, feel free to send me Java-related (or somewhat Java-related!) links you think are worth retaining!