JavaChannel’s Interesting Links podcast, episode 13

Welcome to the thirteenth ##java podcast. It’s Tuesday, January 30, 2018. Your hosts are Joseph Ottinger (dreamreal on IRC) and Andrew Lombardi (kinabalu on IRC) from Mystic Coders. We have a guest this podcast: Cedric Beust, who’s always been very active in the Java ecosystem, being a factor in Android and author of TestNG as well as JCommander and other tools – and it’s fair to say that if you’ve used modern technology, Cedric’s actually had something to do with it. Really.
As always, this podcast is basically interesting content pulled from various sources, and funneled through the ##java IRC channel on freenode. You can find the show notes at the channel’s website, at javachannel.org; you can find all of the podcasts using the tag (or even “category”) “podcast”, and each podcast is tagged with its own identifier, too, so you can find this one by searching for the tag “podcast-13”.
A topic of discussion from ##java last week centers on code coverage: what numbers are “good”? What numbers can be expected? What’s a good metric to consider? Joseph likes (apparently) absurdly high numbers, like 90% or higher; Cedric recommends 50% code coverage as a good baseline; Andrew targets 70%. Expect a poll in the channel on this! It’s a really good discussion, but it’s not really going to be summarized here; listen to the podcast!

  1. Grizzly – an HTTP server library based on NIO – has been donated to EE4J. That’s not particularly interesting in and of itself, but there’s a question of whether all the projects being donated to EE4J imply an abandonment of Java EE as a container stack. It may not be; after all, EE4J is an umbrella just like Java EE itself is, so this may be very much what we should expect – which makes pointing it out as news rather odd. (The original item was from Reddit.)

  2. Pivotal gave us a really interesting article, called “Understanding When to use RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka.” Kafka and RabbitMQ are both sort of message-oriented, but there’s a lot of confusion about when you’d use one against the other; this article discusses both RabbitMQ’s and Kafka’s strengths and weaknesses. It would have been nicer to talk about AMQP as opposed to RabbitMQ, but the article works nonetheless. Kafka is a high-performance message streaming library; it’s not transactional in the traditional sense; it’s incredibly fast. AMQP is slower (but still really fast, make no mistake) and provides traditional pub/sub and point to point messaging models. The main point of the article, though, is that if you need something other than a traditional model, Kafka is there… but it’s going to involve some effort.

  3. Gradle 4.5 has been released. It’s supposedly faster than it was, and has improvements for C/C++ programmers. It also has better documentation among other changes; Gradle’s good, and this release is important, but it’s not earth-shattering. This discussion veered off quickly and sharply to Cedric’s homegrown build tool, kobalt – and mentioned Eclipse’ Aether library, since migrated to Apache under the maven-resolver project.

  4. More Java 9 shenanigans: Java EE modules – including CORBA, specifically – aren’t part of the unnamed module in Java 9. This comes to us courtesy of InfoQ, which pointed out CORBA specifically – CORBA being harder to reach isn’t really a big deal, I’d think, because nobody’s intentionally dealt with it who hasn’t absolutely had to. And it’s not really a Java EE module, really, so pointing out the removal along with Java EE is accurate but misleading. What does this mean? Well, if you’re using one of the nine modules removed, you’re likely to have to include flags at compilation and runtime to make these modules visible for your app. (See http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/320 for the actual Java Enhancement Proposal.)

  5. There’s a Java Enhancement Proposal for multiline strings. It’s in draft, but has Brian Goetz’ support; this is one of those features that Java doesn’t have that’s left people wondering why for a long time, I think – every other JVM language seems to include it. This doesn’t come up very often – if it was actually all that critical it would have been done a long time ago – but it’ll be nice to see it when (and if) it does make it into Java. It’s done with backticks; it does not use interpolation. Interesting, though.

  6. Baeldung has an article called “The Trie Data Structure in Java,” which, well, presents a Trie. It’s a good article, and explains the data structure really well – but doesn’t explain why you’d use a Trie as opposed to some other similar data structures. Tries represent a tradeoff between data size and speed; Tries tend to be incredibly fast while being more memory-hungry than some of their counterparts. Incidentally: there’s a question of pronunciation! “Trie” is typically pronounced the same was as “tree” is – while Joe pronounces it like “try” and struggled mightily to concede to peer pressure and say “tree.” Naturally, he was inconsistent about it; early pronunciation was in fact like “try” but, as stated, convention says “tree.” And it is a tree structure…

  7. Simon Levermann, sonOfRa on the channel, published a reference to his new pwhash project, a result of a series of discussions that seem to have gone on for a few weeks on the channel. It’s a password hashing library; it provides a unified interface to a set of hashing algorithms, like argon2 and bcrypt.

JavaChannel's Interesting Links podcast, episode 11

Welcome to the eleventh ##java podcast. I’m Joseph Ottinger, dreamreal on the IRC channel, and it’s Tuesday, 2018 January 16. Andrew Lombardi (kinabalu on IRC) from Mystic Coders is also on the podcast, and this episode has a special guest, Kirk Pepperdine from Kodewerk.
As always, this podcast is basically interesting content pulled from various sources, and funneled through the ##java IRC channel on freenode. You can find the show notes at the channel’s website, at javachannel.org; you can find all of the podcasts using the tag (or even “category”) “podcast”, and each podcast is tagged with its own identifier, too, so you can find this one by searching for the tag “podcast-11”.
This podcast has a lot to say about Meltdown, courtesy of Kirk – who’s a performance expert and one of the people you go to when you really need to figure out what your Java application is doing. The short version is this: Meltdown and Spectre are going to affect everything, due to the way modern CPUs work (listen to the podcast to figure out why – it’s fascinating!) – and Java’s reputation as the environment where you can code and let the JVM magically fix everything for you may be in danger. Intel may have revived the importance of data structures for the JVM singlehandedly – not a bad thing, necessarily, but something Java programmers might have to get used to again.
Kirk also went into the things that make Java 9 worth using – and it’s not modules. It’s the extended APIs and the packaging support, neither of which get mentioned very much because of all the chatter about modules.
The interesting links for this week:

  1. DZone has been putting out a lot of information regarding Java 9’s modules. Up first is “Java 9 Modules Introduction (Part 1)“, which does a pretty good job of walking through Java 9 modules from the basics on up. It’s all command-line based, so no IDE, no Maven, no Gradle – Part 2 promises integration with tooling. But knowing what the tools do is important, so this article is a good introduction, about as good as any other so far.

  2. Another entry from DZone on Java 9 is “Java 9 Module Services”, which could be written to be more clear – it refers to a source repository instead of showing lots of relevant code – but does walk through the old ServiceLoader stuff and then walks through the same mechanism in Java 9.

  3. Speaking of tooling: Baeldung has done a walkthrough of docker-java-api, providingi a guide to a Java client that interfaces with the Docker daemon, providing programmatic management of images, volumes, and networks.

  4. There’s also resilience4j, a fault-tolerance library inspired by Netflix Hystrix.It provides features for limited retries, transaction management, a number of other such things; I haven’t run into a situation where I’ve needed this (transaction management has been enough, generally) but it looks like it might be useful; maybe I’ve made architectural decisions that allow me to avoid using libraries like this because I didn’t want to write the features myself. Maybe if I’d known about this, my choices would be different… hard to say.

  5. Lastly, there’s little-java-functions, a collection of functions that look pretty useful, although not modular at all. This library covers a lot of ground. The lack of modularity probably works against it; since we’ve mentioned Java 9 so much, it’d be nice if it mentioned Java 9 compatibility with modules, but maybe Java isn’t prepared to go that far down the Scala rabbit-hole yet. In the process of recording this, a potential problem with licenses came up – possibly the subject of a future conversation – and the author ended up explicitly licensing the code under Creative Commons, thanks to Andrew.

Interesting Links – 2017/May/25

  • How Fonts are Fueling the Culture Wars is an article talking about, well, font usage and what specific fonts mean, which has only a tangential relation to Java — but think about it in terms of user experience, too. Do you think the user experience of Java communicates a specific mode of thought? If so, what would it be? (And no, “Duhhhh” is not a valid answer!)
  • From DZone: The Soon-to-Be-Hated Object Locator presents a pattern for a type of God Object, except possibly restricted in scope enough to not earn the full derision that a God Object deserves… maybe.
  • Also from DZone: The Genius of the Law of Demeter, an article with far less controversy than a God Object would create. The short form of the Law of Demeter says that you call methods on objects that your class owns directly: this.getFoo().bar() is okay, but this.getFoo().getBar().baz() is not (and, as usual, there’s more to it than this.)
  • Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim documents the usage patterns for questions that … help developers exit vim. Vim isn’t especially common for Java developers (although it happens) – but still! What a great editor! How user-friendly does an editor have to be that one in 20000 visits to Stack Overflow is specifically about how to exit the editor? (And now I wonder how many visits are about exiting Emacs, too…)
  • Java 9 expert group minutes: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/spec/minutes/2017-05-18 – it’s good to keep up on the current status, because the implications of every choice made are pretty serious. The second set of minutes are also available.
  • vJUG24 is back! (… I didn’t know what this was until someone sent it to me.)

Interesting Links – 2017/Apr/26

Yes, it’s been a while, I’ve been busy and I’m the only curator of this content:

… and just because I have a weird sense of humor:

randomUser> This code would run really well if it didn't keep waiting for the PRNG to determine the sign of a random number.