Back to newsletter 026 contents

JavaWorld stopped free access to its archived articles on January 20th. You can still access new articles free for one week after they are published, but after that they are available only to subscribers.

Update: at the moment (end January) this policy seems to be on hold and all articles are currently accessible

This is an effort by JavaWorld to increase revenue. JavaWorld has a useful article archive, but the last few articles from JavaWorld seem to have been on how not to use Java. Two recent ones were about using Flash for presentation and moving Java apps to .Net. Hardly attractive articles for the readership of a Java magazine.

There is also an element of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted here. For those of you who need access to old archived articles, I suggest using Google's cache. If you search for a JavaWorld article on Google, Google presents the option of viewing Google's cached version of the article. You need to be a little clever about searching for second and subsequent pages of an article, but mainly they are all cached and accessible. This won't work for JavaWorld articles published after 20th January, but that's life.

Fortunately, all the most useful JavaWorld articles have had (or will have) their useful bits extracted here in our tips sections.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Here at JavaPerformanceTuning.com, our archives remain completely free to access. And we are increasing the amount of information we are providing with our newsletters. This month we have added a new regular section, "Question of the Month". This month's question addresses the garbage collection algorithms currently available in JVM 1.4.1+. In the future we hope to add yet more regular sections.

The articles listed this month would be sufficient to set you up with a highly scaled J2EE site, including the infrastructure. Articles on NIO and webserver implementation (JAWS) show how to create a high performance server; High availability WAS shows how to configure for reliable high performance; distributed design and large scale architecture are covered by Venners and Ludin; then we have servlet best practices and Ace's Hardware showing how to optimize and scale servlet based J2EE; a detailed comparison of J2EE solutions from Rice University; and a couple of articles on efficient J2EE clients. We also list efficient pooling and sorting, optimized microjava games and how to build simulations and microbenchmarks.

Our other regular sections are all present. Kirk (the roundup) covers discussions on XML in 1.4 (slower), loop count ordering, timer resolution, EJBs, and more. Javva (the hutt) continues his diary, and relates a fictional (absolutely, definitely fictional) dialogue he didn't overhear. Our interview this month with Brian Goetz covers XML, a couple of expert groups, caching, when to optimize, better profiling tools and more. All the latest performance tips are extracted from our listed articles, and we have a new tool report on IBMs WebSphere Studio Profiler.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tool Reports

• WebSphere Studio Profiling Tool

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Gosling publicises successful large-scale Brazilian Java development (national health-care) online for 12 million people scattered across 44 cities and regions, dealing in huge amounts of data (medical records for all of Brazil's citizens, including radiology images, medical histories, prescriptions etc). The project is intending to publish it's sources in the future

Books

• Java Enterprise Best Practices (O'Reilly) (includes an explicit performance chapter and many performance tips throughout)

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tools

• Trade3 is the third generation of the WebSphere end-to-end benchmark and performance sample application.
• FastParser: a High performance Java XML parser
• A Lightweight Java Games Library extension. Includes high-performance 3D, memory addresses and hi-res timers.
• GCold garbage collection stress benchmark
• HotSwap: GUI front-end to dynamic class redefinition capability of 1.4 JVMs
• GCSpy garbage collection visualization tool
• Modified JVM for tracing execution

Recent Articles

• Scaling Server Performance (Brian Neal/AcesHardware)
• Implementing High Availability for WebSphere Application Servers (John Lamb, Michael Laskey/e-ProMag.com)
• Sorting (Alex Blewitt/JavaWorld)
• Make Object Pooling Simple (Karthik Rangaraju/JavaPro)
• Servlet Best Practices 1 (Jason Hunter/OnJava)
• Servlet Best Practices 2 (Jason Hunter/OnJava)
• Designing Distributed Systems (Bill Venners/Artima.com)
• New IO API (Todd Stewart/OCIWeb)
• Simulate discrete simultaneous events (David Mertz/IBM)
• Designing and Implementing J2EE Clients (Mark Johnson, Inderjeet Singh, Beth Stearns/informIT)
• Intro to MicroJava Game creation (David Fox/OnJava)
• J2EE Enterprise Bean Basics (Dale Green, Kim Haase, Eric Jendrock, Stephanie Bodoff, Monica Pawlan, Beth Stearns/informIT)
• Benchmarking Method Devirtualization and Inlining (Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein/JavaLobby)
• Performance and Scalability of EJB Applications (Emmanuel Cecchet, Julie Marguerite, Willy Zwaenepoel/OOPSLA)
• Large-Scale Financial Applications & Service-Oriented Architectures (Anwar Ludin/BEA)

Older Articles

• Optimizing the performance of JAWS Webserver (James C. Hu, Irfan Pyarali, Douglas C. Schmidt/Distributed Object-Oriented Systems)

Jack Shirazi

Back to newsletter 026 contents