John Davies shares insight into SQL, NoSQL, grid, virtualization and caching technologies from his personal experience using them in financial institutions. By John Davies

Chris Meadows introduces Redis, explaining what it is good for, what does it take to be run, and what's under the hood through a social networking code example. By Chris Meadows

Aryeh Selekman discusses current trends in the mobile space, some of the technologies useful to integrate Facebook functionality into mobile applications and the latest W3C mobile standards under dev. By Aryeh Selekman

Let's start with the basic question: What is the disruptor? The disruptor is a concurrency framework for Java that allows data sharing between threads. The age old way of coding a producer-consumer model is to use a queue as the buffer area between the producer and the consumer, where the producer adds data objects to the queue, which are in turn processed by the consumer. However, such a model does not work well at the hardware level and ends up being highly inefficient. The disruptor in its simplest form replaces the queue with a data structure known as the 'ring buffer'. Which brings us to the next question, what is the ring buffer? The ring buffer is an array of fixed length (which must be a power of 2), it's circular and wraps. This data structure is at the core of what makes the disruptor super fast.

Speaking as the devil's advocate, it's not looking so good for Team Java right now. Last week some serious security risks came to light, prompting some to suggest sandboxing the JVM. Now, Apple has reacted to the security concerns by taking another step away from Java.

If you are interested in Java EE development and the roadmap, you might have read recently that the Cloud feature in Java EE 7 has been delayed. Preview Text: A few months ago I was struggling (again) with logging configuration in JBoss 7.x. I was so depressed that I wrote to the Java EE 7 expert group : Logs. Should we finally do something? As a...

It’s Friday, and time to start getting ready for the weekend by going a bit off-topic. Here’s a few cool things that caught our eye across the web this week. 1. A Google-powered Java speech API Let’s start with some Java. Luke Kuza’s speech API uses Google technology to both recognise speech input and synthesise output - meaning that, yes, you too can build a hands-free Siri-style assistant for your app. The only apparent downside is that, like Siri, it also requires an internet connection. While we haven’t had a chance to try it out ourselves, we’d love to know if you do anything cool with it - drop us a line on Twitter @jaxentercom. 2. TextMate lives again Here’s one for Mac users: when OS X code editor TextMate 2 was made open-source last month, there was plenty of cynicism over whether the old dog still had life in it. Yet, to everyone’s surprise the app has seen a new lease of life, with over 400 commits and a whole bunch of updates. So why not take it for a spin? Or better yet, contribute to the codebase? 3. The record-breaking Cheetah robot Not even Usain Bolt himself can run from this terrifying military-developed robot, demonstrated yesterday reaching 28.3mph (45.5km/h). The headless metal beast, nicknamed the “cheetah” for fairly obvious reasons, is the latest experimental limbed robot from Boston Dynamic (they also made 2008’s uneven-terrain-walking ‘big dog’). We couldn’t agree more with Noel Sharkey, an academic at Sheffield University, when he describes it as “an incredible technical achievement, but it's unfortunate that it's going to be used to kill people”. 4. TimBL’s Web Index Forget the Olympics (and Paralympics): the only table of countries you need is the Web Index, published today by Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation. The index takes into account the web’s political, economic and social impact on each country, as well as their internet infrastructure and the level of use. Current #1 is Sweden, with a web index score of 100, followed closely by the USA (97.31), UK (93.83) and Canada (93.42). 5. The Online Cat-Industrial Complex And finally... we all love cats on the internet, but it seems that Japan’s passion for them runs even deeper. Wired’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written an epic 6,400-word essay on the subject, in which he catalogues the history of cats on the internet, attempts to secure an audience with the world-famous Maru, and ponders what it is about cats that make them so lovable. Oh, and it’s accompanied by a compilation some of the best cat pictures on the net. Cute cat photo by dougwoods.

Those who rise to become an Agile Enterprise do not automatically achieve greater competitiveness. Gone are the days when a team could be called agile by accomplishing five releases per year - today truly agile companies create multiple releases per day. The problem is that the majority of agile teams are tuned for speed, innovation and change, but few are focusing on actual results. Stephen Burton of AppDynamics discusses this within his JAX-Keynote - what happens when companies become too focused becoming "Agile" and how this obsession can even make an end of the business. Stephen gives practical tips for developer teams can handle agility properly 2 Fast 2 Furious: Was passiert, wenn Agile zur Besessenheit wird from JAX TV on Vimeo.

Monday is the last day to register for Core Spring in Dublin and London to SAVE 30% on the registration fee. SpringSource has also extended the offer to Austria, The Netherlands and Switzerland. Make sure to register in time. Registration is possible by selecting the class near you below: Core Spring September 18 - 21: Dublin, Ireland September 18 - 21: London, United Kingdom September 25 - 28: Amsterdam, The Netherlands October 02 - 05: Zurich, Switzerland October 09 - 12: Wien, Austria Please use the following discount code in the referral code field during the registration process: SPLPROMOCLS To view more training locations please visit the vFabric Education page

The past few weeks have been tumultuous for Oracle and Java EE. Not long after the much-talked about Jigsaw incident, Java’s steward made it known that the PaaS specs targeted for Java EE 7 were likely to move further down the line. As the promised features dissipate, it doesn’t exactly help Oracle’s standing with enterprises or the community, despite the latter undoubtedly being the correct decision. It also raises questions over whether they are really tackling the important aspects for Java. One man who thinks talk of cloud standardisation and multi-tenancy has distracted us from the real Java issues is Paris JUG co-leader Antonio Goncalves. In a blogpost, the Java EE 7 Expert Group Member brought up an incredibly important issue that has been overlooked - logging. Goncalves argues that with so many logging frameworks now available, isn’t it now time to consider standardising a Logging API in Java? After all, the decision to lump cloud in Java EE 7 happened as the market is still very much in flux. Logging has been one of Java’s weak points for a decade or more now, and has been continually causing issues for development teams, mainly because of how sluggish the process can be. Just by the sheer number of alternatives that have arisen, java.util.logging has become nigh on redundant. Apache’s Log4j has become the optimal choice for developers but there’s a myriad of options - Commons Logging, SLF4J, Logback and TinyLog are all popular enough. Goncalves adds: Few months ago I was struggling (again) with logging configuration in JBoss 7.x. I was so depressed that I wrote to the Java EE 7 expert group : Logs. Should we finally do something? (you should read it, there are valuable opinions expressed by the members). As a developer I’ve used all the possible logging Java frameworks for the last 12 years and I still struggle with logging in 2012. I’m not a log expert and I’m sure all these frameworks exist for good reasons (I’m trying to be politically correct here), but for god sake, we just need to write logs. I don’t want to do a benchmark of all the logging APIs to make up my mind. I don’t want to have to relearn a new logging framework each time a new version of my application server is out. So how do we solve this logging headache? Goncalves argues that now is the perfect for logging standardisation. “Standardizing too soon is bad… but we’ve been doing logs for more than a decade now,” he says.  Many were banking on modularity to solve the problem, but with that ship not docking until Java 9, it just isn’t an option anymore. But when modularity is enforced, having a standardised Logging API at Java’s disposal should make portability far easier. Goncalves realises that he isn’t the man to be spec lead for this, with his expertise lying elsewhere, but is calling upon others within the logging community to take the baton on this. Are you the person to lead? More importantly, do you agree with him that logging is something which Java needs to tackle now before it’s too late? Give us your opinion below.   Image courtesy of decade_null on Flickr

As you may have seen from my past performance related articles and HashMap case studies, Java thread safety problems can bring down your Java EE application and the Java EE container fairly easily. Preview Text: This article will revisit this classic thread safety problem and demonstrate, using a simple Java program, the risk associated with a...

Welcome to Day 3 of the JavaFX in Spring blog series. In this post we are going to finish off the Customer Data application by taking advantage of the Spring Security APIs on the client. It took a little bit of hacking, but I got a GitHub project put together with a straightforward JavaFX Maven build (details on this in a future post) to run everything. Please give the full project a view...

After becoming a little disenchanted with the SBT for Scala, I wanted an alternative that was more logical, simpler to understand and had a better user experience. After all, the whole point of a domain specific language is to make the writing of the script, formulae or grammar to be affordable to the users. A DSL must be comprehensible to the users, it must be relatively easy to write the script...

Many times I end up using source files from somebody else. And such files might have a lot of empty lines in it I want to get removed. The question is: how to get rid of empty or blank lines in the Eclipse Editor view? Or even better: how to merge multiple empty lines into one? Preview Text: Many times I end up using source files from somebody...

MongoDB is a very popular document-oriented, horizontally-scalable NoSQL datastore. With Spring Roo version 1.2, you can build Spring applications with MongoDB as data storage solutions. Investigate MongoDB and then build an enterprise Spring MongoDB application using Spring Roo.

Spring Roo advanced considerably with the release of Version 1.2. This article introduces the new features in the current release like multi-module project, MongoDB support, JSF support, and many more. You then will develop a multi-module GWT web application using Spring Roo and deploy the application to Cloud Foundry.

Let's start with a quick rewind to the early days of my career as a Java developer. I wanted to eliminate Garbage Collection (GC) pauses from a test that I was conducting. Lo and behold I was annoyed when I discovered that it couldn't be done. Back then I left the issue for a "design error" and moved on with my life. Angry at James Gosling or whoever was responsible for the...

I got a message this morning about a bug that has been fixed in MySQL 5.6.6... which I reported about in early 2006 when I ran MySQL 4.1. I honestly thought this issue was fixed long ago as it was indeed pretty annoying. I must say I'm very impressed with the Oracle team for going and cleaning up such very old bugs. Here is a description from the bug: Preview Text: ...