Ted Neward

Busy Developer's Guide to Iconoclasm

History is littered with the stories of iconoclasts–people who truly stood out as pioneers, lateral thinkers, and in some cases, outright heroes–and their successes and failures. From the baseball management vision of Branch Hickey to the glassblowing vision of Dale Chihuly to the engineering design vision of Steve Jobs, iconoclasts have changed our world in subtle and profound ways, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Collections

For so many Java developers, the java.util.* package consists of List, ArrayList, and maybe Map and HashMap. But the Collections classes are so much more powerful than many of us are led to believe, and all it requires is a small amount of digging and some simple exploration to begin to “get” the real power of the Collection classes.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Functional Java

Much noise has been made in recent years about functional languages, like Scala or Haskell, and their benefits relative to object-oriented languages, most notably Java. Unfortunately, as wonderful as many of those benefits are, the fact remains that most Java developers will either not want or not be able to adopt those languages for writing day-to-day code. Which leaves us with a basic question: if I can't use these functional languages to write production code, is there any advantage to learning about them?

  The short answer is yes, for the fundamental premise--"I can't use functional code on my Java project"--is flawed. Java developers can, in fact, make use of functional ideas, and what's better, they don't even have to reinvent them for Java--thanks to the FunctionalJava library, many of the core primitives--interfaces that serve as base types for creating function values, for example--already exist, ready to be used.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Advanced Collections

Once you've learned the core Collections clases, you're done, right? You know everything there is to know about Collections, and you can “check that off” your list of Java packages you have to learn and know, right?

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to JMS

The Java Message Service API provides a unified programming interface to a variety of different messaging systems, and provides a necessary and important supplement to distributed communications.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Advanced JMS

Once you've mastered the basics of JMS, a whole new world of interesting capability opens up. Understanding all of the possible permutative capabilities in the JMS API is another story, however–when do you use transactions? When do you use acknowledgement? When do you use persistent message queues, and when are simpler Topics acceptable instead? Message selectors?