Time for the “Best Of The Week” links for the week that just passed. Here are some links that drew Java Code Geeks attention:
* Java.next: In this presentation, the argument that Java is still the best programming language for the JVM (if simplified idioms are used along with proper tooling) is posed. Also see The Most Powerful JVM Language Available and Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.
* The ultimate guide to passwords: Nice article on passwords and security. It discusses password hashing, rainbow attacks, salted hashes, offline cracking, secure passwords (those complex enough to make cracking it uneconomical) and password vaults. Also check out Introduction to Strong Cryptography for a developer’s perspective on the matter.
* Installation: Where Software Remains in the Dark Ages: In this article the author criticizes some bad practices related to software installation, such as irreversible changes in the system, extensive use of environment variables, forced reboots and others.
* Tracking User Behavior with Google Analytics SDK for Android: This tutorial show how to use the Google Analytics SDK for Android in order to track Android application events like screen loads and button clicks in order to determine what your application’s users are doing. Also check out Android Game Postmortem – ArkDroid Development and “Android Full Application Tutorial” series.
* Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?: Jeff Atwood discusses web traffic encryption and argues that over the medium to long term, adopting encrypted web connections as a standard for logged-in users is the healthiest direction for the future of the web. Also see Hints for writing secure code.
* The 7 habits of highly effective developers: Nice article on the habits that effective developers should adopt, such as adopting proactivity, thinking win-win, beginning with the end in mind and others.
* Hidden evils of Java’s String.split() and replace(): This article explores the performance of String’s methods split and replace. Regular expressions should be considered instead of those. Also check out String performance and Exact String Matching.
* Smell my Code. Code smell ? What’s code smell?: Short, but to the point, article on code smell, i.e any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem. Common coding smells include duplicated code, large class, feature envy and others.
* Tailoring Spring for Custom Usage: This presentation uncovers some of the hooks available in the Spring framework: life cycles, scopes, beans, resources, XML marshallers, REST, transactions, caching, Spring Integration adapters, and others.
* Figure out why is JAVA eating CPU?: Short guide on how to identify which Java thread is consuming the system’s CPU. It uses Java’s debugging tools (e.g. jstack) along with Linux’s built-in tools (e.g. ps, grep).
* Getting out of the way – Monitoring: In this article, the author suggests that we should be working to make the monitoring happen automatically without Ops involvement. This means that Ops selects monitoring systems that allow for discovery of new metrics & automatic collection of those metrics without additional incremental work each time. Also see Devops has made Release and Deployment Cool.
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for more, here at Java Code Geeks.
Cheers,
Ilias Tsagklis
