Maven is considered by many only as a build tool. Maven, as defined by the project’s website, is a project management and comprehension tool. Aside from helping on managing a build, maven is also useful in documentation, reporting, managing dependencies, SCMs, releases and distributions.

This article talks about the the different Java cloud providers and our first hand experience working with them. Our last project involves deploying an Open-Tides (Spring, Spring MVC, JQuery, Hibernate) application to the cloud and as such, we explored and played around with the different cloud providers.

Generic types added in JDK 5.0 provided enhancement to type safety in Java. For example in using Collections, generic types allow restricting the type the collection would contain as opposed to pre-JDK5 wherein collection classes accept anything that extends from java.lang.Object (which means almost everything!).

There are two types in Java Programming Language. The first is primitive type such as int, double, and boolean. The second is the reference type such as String, List, and Set. Every primitive type has a corresponding reference type, called a boxed primitive.

I recently came across this Java code snippet we created for Open-Tides and still find it very useful in developing flexible and dynamic applications.

So, why is there a need to retrieve values using reflection? The answer is simple – to allow your application rules to be configurable through the database.

I noticed that every time my code will be reviewed by someone, they will ask me something about the purpose of a variable or the logic of the method or even the comments and so on. Because of that, I tend to do a lot of explaining for others to understand my code. I thought to myself, “Is my code really that chaotic?”

How can you ensure that during development, all developers works on the latest database schema to reduce code conflicts? And during production roll-out, how can you ensure that applications on different servers are compatible and consistent with their respective database schema?

Ever seen a Java book with graphical images and humorous text on every page? You may think of it as a style of publishing books to attract readers. You may even think that it’s not worth reading. But you’re wrong! Head First Java 2nd Edition is one of the most fun and motivating Java books you’ll ever find. Check out my lil book review…