JavaOne - "The client is back"

Its funny how in the software industry go round and round. Schwartz's comments about the client being back are interesting. Maybe Microsoft .NET taking a share of the client market from Java has influenced this comment - .NET WinForm's do appear to be going places inside investment banks. Not long ago rich clients where supposedly dead and the browser was king.

Looking Glass looks cool. It will be interesting to see how the project evolves, and how it stands up to Microsoft's Longhorn Avalon technology.

Java Performance

Java Performance Tuning by Jack Shirazi is an excellent book - ok I have only read the first 100 pages or so. It's the first book I've read for a while that contains some interesting geeky performance/jvm internal stuff. There is also the well known web site that supports the book.

The Java GC Portal article provides a nice utility to mine the verbose:gc logs, as does Ken Gottry's AWK script.

The is a load of information in Improving Java Application Performance and Scalability by Reducing Garbage Collection Times and Sizing Memory Using JDK 1.4.1

With regards J2SE 1.5, I mean J2SE 5.0 (why did they leave the 2 in J2SE ?), it would be nice to get some idea of how they managed to get the improvements in startup time and memory footprint.

JFluid appears to be moving along nicely

Java Desktop

Allied Irish bank moves to Linux and Java Desktop

JVM Internals

I've been looking for blogs on JVM Internals for a while and came across Moazam Rajas blog last night. Anyone know of any other good source on JVM Internals - apart from the Sun site?

Hibernate and Eclipse

Hibernate seems to be getting a lot of press at the moment. I personally haven't played with it yet, but when I do, I'm going to check out this Eclipse plug-in.

Atomicity

Concurrent Programming in Java (Doug Lea) is really a gem of a book - its been a good few years since I last picked it up.

Atomicity (page 93) is a worth while read - access and updates to the memory cells corresponding to fields of any type except long or double are guaranteed to be atomic. volatile long and volatile double are also atomic.

volatile (page 97) could possible be cheaper than synchronization, or at least no more expensive.

synchronized has a double meaning: it locks permitting higher-level synchronization protocols, plus deals with the memory system (sometimes via memory barriers) to values in sync across threads.

java.blogs

So, given that I am going down the Java road with this blog, I thought I would add this blog to java.blogs. Thanks to FeedBurner, I now have an RSS feed, and am part of the java.blog community.

Books

I thought it was time I bought a few new Java books, since my current Java books are quite outdated. Here's what I bought:

Java Performance Tuning (2nd Edition)
Concurrent Programming in Java(TM): Design Principles and Pattern (2nd Edition)
Java Extreme Programming Cookbook
Server-Based Java Programming

I recently read Hard Core Java which wasn't a bad book - the 'final' chapter was pretty good.