As most Java developers know, putting values in a Java Map (like a HashMap) involves creating a large number of auxiliary objects under the covers. For example, a HashMap with int keys and long values might, for each entry, create a wrapped Integer, a wrapped Long object and a Node that holds the former values together with a hash value …

Kubernetes offers a lot of benefits: an enormous ecosystem with plenty of actors, self-healing capabilities, etc. There’s no free lunch, though. It also comes with downsides, chief among them its complexity and operating costs. However, the more I work with Kubernetes, the more I think its most significant asset is extensibility. If you need something that the platform doesn’t provide …

This is an announcement of the FXGL 17 book. This book is for beginners in Java and/or JavaFX who wish to develop apps and games with FXGL, while improving Java and JavaFX skills. This book is also suitable for experienced developers who wish to learn how to use FXGL. Lastly, game developers familiar with Unity, Unreal Engine or Godot who …

I was reading this article and wanted to post a comment but I felt this warrants a response article. First, if you don’t know me I’ve written a ton of Open Source code. A whole platform and then some. I think the general view expressed in that article and a lot of the fluff I see online is over simplistic …

The O’Reilly book, Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, features a quote from Ray Kurzweil, the noted inventor and futurist:  “An invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.”  This quote has a prophetic ring to it, especially considering my co-author Eben Hewitt included it in the 2010 first edition of …

Creating Java applications is great, and many resources are available. To speed up development, many folks use frameworks and libraries that do some of the heavy lifting. When looking at modern Java applications, almost all of them contain dependencies from libraries developed by someone else. Dependencies take up about 80 to 90 percent of the binary — so, we should …

Unix has been around for more than 50 years, and the original design principles must be good enough for it (and its derivative, Linux) to be the most widely used Operating System on the planet – 80% of servers, most supercomputers, and the most deployed OS (Android). It is also the most popular OS on Mars! Much of Unix’s success can be attributed …

1. Introduction In our previous article, we looked at augmenting our dashboard to store and display individual events from the Avengers using DataStax Astra, a serverless DBaaS powered by Apache Cassandra using Stargate to offer additional APIs for working with it. In this article, we will be making use of the exact same data in a different way. We are going to allow the user to select …

Context When Java 17 was released, we (the platform team at Auto Trader where I was working at the time) were fairly quick to provide a new Docker base image to allow our developers to gain the benefits of the new goodness in the JDK available since Java 11, the previous LTS version. Over the course of a few years, we’ve …

A ruthless battle occurs every day on the World Wide Web. Its goal is to decide which programming flavor is the best: OOP or FP? I assume that imperative and procedural programming are not part of the contenders. Arguments range from the factual to the irrelevant to the utterly stupid. A couple of years ago, I wanted to listen to …