Alerting the affiliates

Pre-announcing a news flash

I heard something on radio the other day that I hadn't heard in years. The announcer was "alerting the affiliates" of a change to the schedule during the third hour. The stations carrying the broadcast would have to make changes to the timing of the commercial breaks. Years ago, this was common. You would hear them during broadcasts of ball games and other live events. This was more common in a time where the only way to get a message out to all of the stations carrying the broadcast was to say something on air during it - the ultimate listener pattern.

So as hokey as it feels to say so, I'm alerting the affiliates (our readers), that there are changes coming to the site in a little bit that may have some impact on performance. We have a bunch of changes and additions that will be rolled out in the next few weeks.

In today's Weblogs, David Walend blogs about Amazing -Xlint. He writes that he's "been able to implement generic versions of Floyd-Warshall and Dijkstra's algorithms -- hopefully using generics means doing this for the last time. I want to highlight -Xlint, a JDK 5 feature that's saved me a lot of grueling code reads as I've learned generics. I wish I'd found it sooner."

In Also in Java Today , adding CPU's to a multiprocessor machine should speed up your J2EE app, and it does, but not without an unintended side effect. A single CPU can read and write to memory with impunity. But a multi-processor machine needs to synchronize access to main memory, so that threads on the different processors don't corrupt each others' data. In Memory Contention in J2EE Applications for Multiprocessor Platforms, Deepak Goel and Ramchandar Krishnamurthy investigate this by testing progressively larger objects under progressively heavier loads on a multi-processor system. They found "high memory requirements of these J2EE threads clearly create a contention in the system and acts as a bottleneck in the scaling of the J2EE applications." Fortunately, their article also provides some strategies to deal with the slowdown created by memory contention.

Mark Stone introduces his article on Java and open source by saying that "the open source code that is written in a language is often more important than the open source status of the language itself. In this article we'll move away from questions about the Java language, and instead look at how technology companies relate to the large amount of open source programming being done in Java." He revisits the notion that "freely distributable products engender three different business models: Market growth, Market penetration, and Market preemption" and relates each to the Java ecosystem.

In Projects and Communities, this week's spotlight is the Java Enterprise project WebWork, an app server with reusable UI components, pluggable configuration, and an IoC container.

The Java Games community is running a poll on which 3D API you use. Choose among LWJGL, JOGL, Xith3D, jME, and Java3D.

In today's Forums, Zander writes "Adding something extra to learn and something not intuitively obvious in its function implies its a trick. Java should not be about learning tricks but about simple logic and intuitive constructs."

KCPeppe writes "One of the style guidelines is that a method should never be more than what you can see on the screen. The reason that this guideline works in any language is because smaller methods tend to be useful in a larger number of situations. So instead of procedurally hacking in everything that needs to be done in a few methods, if you should find the core abstractions and then allow the larger pieces of functionality navigate through the more primitice methods (not unlike a workflow). "

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