Here Be BeastiesAlastair Maw’s small soap box.

Do you write Java using Eclipse? Do you care about code coverage but only look at it every now and then because Cobertura or whatever you use requires a full-on Ant/Maven 2 build and you don’t bother looking as often as you should? If so, check out EclEmma, which is easy, free and fabulous.

Matt Raible has a post asking people for various statistics about their web framework of choice. He’s asking for numbers for the following: How many tools (i.e. IDE plugins) are available for your web framework? How many jobs are available for your framework on Dice.com? What about Indeed.com? How many messages where [sic] posted to [...]

Eelco took my original ten minute hack and ran with it, and has produced something that covers a lot more edge cases. It handles anonymous inner classes, externalizables, things with custom writeObject() functions and a bunch of other stuff. It also plays nicely with SecurityManagers. You can find the code in Wicket 1.3′s SerializableChecker.java. It [...]

Ever had a java.io.NotSerializableException in your code and found it very hard to debug? The JVM stack trace is nearly useless, telling you which code triggered the serialization, but not what it is trying to serialize. Particularly tedious are HTTP sessions that refuse to serialize. In Wicket we store detached components in the session between [...]

I’ve found a mightily useful page explaining the world of Sun JVM options. Absolutely invaluable if you’re trying to squeeze everything out of your poor overloaded appserver.