The other day I was asked how much I knew about Java garbage collection. I am not a performance guru, so I admitted that I knew very little, basically only that it works. As the conversation continued, I realized that while I did not know much about the internals of the garbage collection mechanism, I [...]

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Some days, you have to search the news and various sites to find something interesting to write about. Other days, the topic appears in your email. Today, there was a blog post and an email that just fit nicely together. The email asked what being a software engineer was like, and I will answer that [...]

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Image via CrunchBase

By now you have heard that Oracle bought Sun. I did not want to write about it yesterday as I wanted to sit and think about the effect this has on anything Sun related. There is some good high-level business analysis from Reuters as well. There is one important quote from that article [...]

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As a java developer, I write unit tests all the time. There are a lot of ways to do this, but sometimes unit testing becomes difficult. This could be because you need to test a Struts action or you do not want your unit tests to hit your database. So, the question is what tools [...]

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In case you did not hear the news, Google has announced the availability of Java on Google App Engine. This is a very big development for many developers as Java is widely used, but not typically supported cheaply. Many hosting services allow for Java applications, but normally you just get the ability to drop in [...]

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