Nicholas Hagen

As part of a load testing project, I needed to collect and store data as fast as possible in a multi-threaded environment. This meant synchronizing on collections to avoid collisions. Synchronization is always a bad idea in any performance critical application. In my simple testing, adding to a synchronized ArrayList can be almost 4x slower [...]

One of the recent additions to TeaTrove I am making is adding the between and in operator. This may seem trivial, but they are quite powerful as well as generally better performing, not to mention easier to read. The SQL standard has had these operators for decades because they just make sense. I’m rather surprised [...]

Although some would say there are two competing standards for handling live events on the web, websockets and server-sent events (event source), they are really very different from each other with their own use cases. I have always been a proponent of websockets as it is bi-directional and as a result more powerful. Although in [...]

Web applications in Java EE (and even SE) have many components from MDB configuration to JMS configuration to Servlet configuration to JPA/database configuration. Each of these components has their own methodology of configuration. Further, some are easier to manage than others. The reason this is important is when it comes to managing your environments from [...]

In the previous two blog articles (simple projects) (plugins), we touched on setting up standard Grails applications and plugins through Maven. In this article, we are going to talk about multi-module projects and how to build plugins and applications together as a single Maven build.

Unfortunately, there is a rather unsettling bug in the JDK in the java.beans package for Introspector when handling bridge methods. For those unfamiliar with that term, JDK 5 created a new modifier called bridge that is only set by the compiler (ie: there is no actual keyword for it in the language that you can [...]

One of the more common tasks in using a templating language like Grails is modular-based development. On a given page, you may have a common module used by several pages. For example, you may want a shopping cart on every page or have a set of social network widgets on various pages. Rather than duplicating [...]

Generics in Java is one of those features where almost everyone uses but very people, including myself, really understand. I had a conversation just today about understanding a use case of generics within collections and came to a realization of why generics were applied in a certain way. It is very important to not only [...]

As part of a recent project, I had a need to generate classes to a temporary directories. Currently, this was being done by a simple File-based path. However, that has two downfalls: the paths are tied to the implementation of the application server and files may be blocked in the application server. However, JSPs do [...]

Several sites are moving towards an API program to allow easier access as well as mashup data. The use of an API is considerably different from typical methodologies such as direct database access. The biggest difference is latency and time. Further, the work being done during REST lookups is more idle time or I/O processing [...]