Eric Burke shares tips on creating visually appealing Android applications that scale to various screen sizes. The session focuses on custom views, scalable drawables, and ListView. By Eric Burke

A recent JBoss post dredges up the old ?Java is dead? argument by calling out the need for polyglot programming or using other languages in addition to Java. But Java is not going anywhere. - For the record: Java is not dead, nor is it dying. It is, however, mature, and perhaps a little grumpy and set in its ways. Yet it seems one of the best ways to draw attention to a post or commentary on Java and programming is to use the Words ?Java? and some variation of ?dead? in the headlin...

An interesting document on Java's short comings (from C developer's perspective) was written some time ago (about 2000? ) but many of the arguments issues are as true (or not) today as they were ten years ago.

This white paper demonstrates the similarities and differences between Oracle GlassFish Server and Apache Tomcat, allowing Tomcat users to make an informed decision about which is application server is right for their environment.

The Jersey lead has just announced Jersey 1.11 which offers EclipseLink's MOXy support, attaching filters to non-blocking clients as well as some docs cleanup.

Java Evangelist Arun Gupta provides an overview of the JAX-RS 2.0 Early Draft. JAX-RS 2.0, just like JPA 2.1, was one one of the first JSRs to be filed as part of Java EE 7.

See JavaFX 2.0 components in action as developer Gerrit Grunwald migrates the SteelSeries component library from Swing to JavaFX.

There is an increasing number of Java libraries which are described as high performance and have benchmarks to back that claim up. Peter Lawrey provides an overview of them.

Developer Bill Bejeck posits that NIO2 could possibly be the best part of the Java 7 release. It was a small 'revolution', that for the most part, went unnoticed.

See examples of four noteworthy features in GlassFish that add agility to Java EE application deployment.

Vaadin applications can be embedded in any HTML document easily and reliably with the Vaadin XS add-on.

Introductory tutorial on implementing reports over Big Data using Hive and iReport

Using a Complex Event Processing is not so complex. Well, initially at least. The business requirement I used for a POC was met by writing just three easy java classes.

Apache Apollo 1.0, ActiveMQ subproject, was just released. Apollo's new threading model which is geared to multi-core microprocessors makes it faster, more scalable and more reliable than ActiveMQ. Apache Apollo now has JMS support along with a set of JMS benchmarks that show it is a clear competitor in the messaging space. By Rick Hightower

Model Binding is a feature that simplifies controller actions by using the request data to create strongly typed objects. Jess Chadwick takes a deep dive into this feature in an MSDN article and explores complex scenarios, as well as creating custom model binders when the default model binder is not enough. By Roopesh Shenoy

The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.

Google Chrome and V8 now support some of the features planned for the next version of JavaScript, known as ECMAScript 3.1 "Harmony". To try out these features you can use dev channel release of Chrome with the "Experimental JavaScript features" flag turned on. By Jonathan Allen

Learn how to use the IBM Rational Asset Analyzer inventory wizard to analyze COBOL and Java (WAR) files, including embedded SQL, by scanning the related files from a Windows directory structure.

I was looking for some way to extract information about types of elements in Java collections/maps using generics (List<String>, Map<String, MyBean>) so that the users of the Static JSF Expression Validator wouldn't need to declare the type of the elements manually. One possible way to get this information is to process the source codes with the Sun Compiler Tree API, available...

The majority of the Spring 3 error handling sample code that I've come across only ever seems to give the simplest overview of its usage, yet how we handle errors is, some would say, more important than how the normal code works. This was borne out the other day when I came across a simple 'GOTCHA' in a Spring 2 error handler that brought a whole website down and almost killed the...

When you adopt a new development tool how much time do you set aside to understand it? Do you just download a new tool like Maven, rip open the archive, install it, and just start clicking around? Or, do you read articles and books first? As we prepare to release Nexus 2.0, I'm curious about how current Nexus users adopted the tool. Leave a comment and let us know how you adopted and...