Simon Willison’s Weblog

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88 items tagged “java”

2024

[...] here’s what we found when we integrated [Amazon Q, GenAI assistant for software development] into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:

  • The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).
  • In under six months, we've been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO

# 24th August 2024, 4:25 am / ai-assisted-programming, amazon, generative-ai, ai, llms, java

2023

Queryable Logging with Blacklite (via) Will Sargent describes how he built Blacklite, a Java library for diagnostic logging that writes log events (as zstd compressed JSON objects) to a SQLite database and maintains 5,000 entries in a “live” database while entries beyond that range are cycled out to an archive.db file, which is cycled to archive.timestamp.db when it reaches 500,000 items.

Lots of interesting notes here on using SQLite for high performance logging.

“SQLite databases are also better log files in general. Queries are faster than parsing through flat files, with all the power of SQL. A vacuumed SQLite database is only barely larger than flat file logs. They are as easy to store and transport as flat file logs, but work much better when merging out of order or interleaved data between two logs.”

# 21st August 2023, 6:13 pm / sqlite, logging, zstd, java

2015

Are traditional web frameworks and languages like RubyOnRail, Spring Boot and PHP dying now when new fast reactive pure JavaScript frameworks and services like Meteor, Node, Angular 2.0 and Firebase are breaking ground?

No.

[... 40 words]

2013

Why doesn’t Google use their resources to improve coding languages?

Google invest vast resources in to language improvements, and have been doing so for over a decade now. Just off the top of my head...

[... 184 words]

Does it still make sense to become a Java developer, or should I migrate to PHP or .NET?

It sounds like you need to expand your horizons a little further. The best programmers I know these days aren’t working solely in Java, PHP or .NET—they may use one those languages, but they’ll also be getting stuck in to dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript or Scala.

[... 222 words]

2012

What is the easiest server-side platform for Android Java developers to learn?

Take a look at the Play framework—last time I looked (a couple of years ago) it seemed to be the most instant productive and sane way of doing server-side Java.

[... 50 words]

Can Scala gain wider usage than Java any time soon?

No, because Scala is harder to master than Java.

[... 54 words]

Where can I find great Java/Scala developers in London?

There are quite a few Scala events in London—here are the ones we know about at the moment: http://lanyrd.com/topics/scala/i...

[... 83 words]

Which web frameworks should I focus on to make myself the most well rounded and to be able to solve the most problems as a web application developer/architect?

Being an expert web developer isn’t about which framework you know, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s important that you know how the tools you are using work, so you can fix things when they break—Joel Spolsky’s law of leaky abstractions is a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...

[... 260 words]

2011

What are the most practical beneficials for Python, comparing to Java?

For me, the single most productive advantage of Python is the ability to work with it interactively in a REPL—I use ipython but Python also ships with an interactive mode out of the box.

[... 176 words]

There is plenty of evidence in the ecosystem to support the hypothesis that, if given the tools to do so easily, object-oriented programmers are ready to embrace functional techniques (such as immutability) and work them into an object-oriented view of the world, and will write better, less error-prone code as a result. Simply put, we believe the best thing we can do for Java developers is to give them a gentle push towards a more functional style of programming.

Brian Goetz

# 19th August 2011, 12:20 pm / functional-programming, java, recovered

2010

Why does Java encourage over-engineering?

I suggest reading “Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns” http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/...

[... 22 words]

Why is Java perceived as not cool for startups? We seem to be getting a lot of feedback lately that a startup should be using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, etc., if they want to be agile and iterate quickly.

You should re-evaluate your beliefs. Dynamic language programmers spend a great deal of time thinking about code quality and maintainability. TDD (and BDD), which I believe was first popularised within the Ruby community) are extremely widespread, and profiling and debugging tools are widely used and constantly improved. A strong test suite provides far more effective protection against bugs than static typing and an IDE.

[... 152 words]

What are the main weaknesses of Java as a programming language?

A cultural bias towards over-engineering. In my experience Java code often ends up a huge network of Factories and AbstractFactories and Visitors and XML configuration files and every design pattern you care to mention, dozens of classes many of which contain hardly any procedural code at all. A lot of Java projects are essentially impossible to navigate without an IDE.

[... 77 words]

Why don’t more people use Google Web Toolkit for web development as opposed to scripting alternatives like JavaScript?

I’m morally opposed to GWT, because I don’t believe in building sites or applications that are entirely dependent on JavaScript to function. As someone who took the time to learn JavaScript, I’m also not at all convinced that Java is a more productive language.

[... 68 words]

Creating Shazam in Java. Using a Fast Fourier Transformation.

# 22nd September 2010, 9:39 pm / algorithms, java, shazam, recovered

We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.

Rafe Colburn

# 10th April 2010, 6:42 pm / microsoft, apple, java, iphone, appstore, rafecolburn

ElasticSearch: Your Data, Your Search. A neat example of how ElasticSearch’s schemaless indexes and native JSON support make it ridiculously easy to index different types of data and run queries across them.

# 12th February 2010, 3:22 pm / elasticsearch, java, search, schemaless, json

Elastic Search (via) Solr has competition! Like Solr, Elastic Search provides a RESTful JSON HTTP interface to Lucene. The focus here is on distribution, auto-sharding and high availability. It’s even easier to get started with than Solr, partly due to the focus on providing a schema-less document store, but it’s currently missing out on a bunch of useful Solr features (a web interface and faceting are the two that stand out). The high availability features look particularly interesting. UPDATE: I was incorrect, basic faceted queries are already supported.

# 11th February 2010, 6:33 pm / search, scaling, rest, lucene, java, elasticsearch, json, http, sharding, solr

Glitch is built in an entirely new and different way for a game. The back end (java at the lowest level, with game logic scripted in Javascript) is designed for maximum flexibility and ease of deployment. That means we'll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis. It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.

Glitch

# 10th February 2010, 11:40 am / glitch, java, javascript, rhino

twitter-text-conformance (via) This is a neat idea: Twitter have released open source libraries for parsing standard tweet syntax in Ruby and Java, but they’ve also released a set of YAML unit tests aimed at anyone who wants to implement the same parsing logic in other languages.

# 6th February 2010, 3:39 pm / twitter, ruby, java, testing, yaml

Plurk: Instant conversations using Comet (via) Plurk’s comet implementation sounds pretty amazing. They’re using a single quad-core server with 32GB of RAM running 8 Node.js instances to serve long-polled comet to 100,000+ simultaneous users. They switched to Node from Java JBoss/Netty and found the new solution used 10 times less memory.

# 1st February 2010, 10:13 am / plurk, comet, javascript, node, netty, java, jboss

2009

Frank Wierzbicki: Leaving Sun. Frank performed miracles at Sun and before, helping bring the Jython project out of stasis and turning it in to an active, community maintained modern Python implementation. If you’re looking for an expert Python/Java/Dynamic languages guy you should snap him up.

# 4th November 2009, 10:33 pm / sun, jython, python, java, frank-wierzbicki

Play framework for Java. I’m genuinely impressed by this—it’s a full stack web framework for Java that actually does feel a lot like Django or Rails. Best feature: code changes are automatically detected and reloaded by the development web server, giving you the same save-and-refresh workflow you get in Django (no need to compile and redeploy to try out your latest changes).

# 25th October 2009, 11:21 pm / play, java, frameworks, web, django, rails

Introducing Cloudera Desktop. It’s a GUI for Hadoop, and under the hood is a whole stack of open source software, including Python, Django, MooTools, Twisted, lxml, CherryPy, Mako, Java and AspectJ.

# 21st October 2009, 6:48 pm / hadoop, open-source, cloudera, python, django, mootools, twisted, lxml, cherrypy, mako, java, aspectj

And so it goes, around again. Charles Miller on Java, pointing out that if you don’t have closures and first-class functions you end up having to add band-aid solutions and special case syntactic sugar. Python’s lack of multi-line lambdas leads to a similar (though less pronounced) effect.

# 3rd September 2009, 9:46 am / java, python, charles-miller, programming-languages

Scriptlets—Quick web scripts (via) From the prolific Jeff Lindsay, a pastebin-style tool for short server-side scripts written in Python, JavaScript or PHP that executes them within a Google App Engine powered sandbox. The Java code that implements the service is available on GitHub.

# 13th August 2009, 1:51 pm / github, jeff-lindsay, webhooks, scriptlets, python, javascript, php, googleappengine, appengine, open-source, java

Jython 2.5.0 Final is out! It’s been a long time coming—congratulations to the team.

# 16th June 2009, 11:21 pm / jython, python, java

Critical Mac OS X Java Vulnerabilities. There’s a five month old Java arbitrary code execution vulnerability which hasn’t yet been patched by Apple. Disable Java applets in your browser until it’s fixed, or random web pages could execute commands on your machine as your user account.

# 19th May 2009, 7:07 pm / osx, security, java, applets, browsers, apple

oauth-signpost. The Qype API uses OAuth to sign client requests with the developer’s API key, so it’s not surprising to see them release a Java OAuth signing library compatible with Google’s Android mobile platform.

# 7th May 2009, 7:33 am / android, oauth, java, qype, api-keys