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It seems like every month I'm talking about Java popularity rather than Java performance. Looking back over the last few months I've analysed current language rankings (Java was easily the top language), reported on those fabulous numbers from JavaOne (five billion Java-powered devices worldwide), and noted the positive effect of the new JAVA ticker on Sun's share price

And when the Java blog-column-chat-site-o-sphere was all excited about Dilbert mentioning Java in his strip I knew I'd be doing it again. Partly it's because I'm surprised at just how popular Java is - our industry is quite fad-ish, and Java has been top of the pile for so long that I was sort of expecting some kind of sustained challenge from something else by now. And partly it's the surprise of finding myself in such a mainstream language - I spent many years being paid to program in Prolog and in Smalltalk and I got used to being niche. When I piled headlong into Java in 1995 because I saw it as a better Smalltalk (it did some things not as well, but most things better), I was expecting it to be a popular language, but even so it's success has exceeded my expectations.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Now on with our newsletter. And in keeping with that Dilbert cartoon, we've invited our own cartoonist, profiler, back to produce another of those excellent performance tuning cartoons. You can see all of profiler's previous cartoons here. We hope to be able to bring more from profiler in the future. And, of course, we have our usual news, article links, tools, and extracted tips. Javva the Hutt is on holiday, but we have an updated tool report on eoLogic's eoSense for WebLogic and WebSphere, and our usual extracted tips from all those articles.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• Fascinating interview with Jeff Kesselman about Sun's Project Darkstar, an open-source infrastructure for massively scaled online applications targeting the games domain.
• Timing Framework library for making Java animation and timing-based control easier.
• Sun Releases Early Access Consumer JRE and Nimbus Preview
• Cajo project provides distributed computing in 20kb and three methods

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• JGear Performance for Eclipse - profiler for memory and CPU profiling and debugging.
• SharePath - Business Transaction Management platform that monitors and tracks all transactions across all tiers of an application in real-time.
• ConcurrentTesting - A tool for testing, debugging, and coverage-measuring of concurrent programs.
• Jsasb - Java Standalone Application Service Bus - adds event-driven programming to a Java app.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Articles

• How to Handle Java Finalization's Memory-Retention Issues (Tony Printezis/Sun)
• Finalization, Threads and the Java Technology-Based Memory Model (Hans-J. Boehm/)
• Why WeakHashMap Sucks (Cliff Click Jr./AzulSystems)
• Did You Know ... (Jon Masamitsu/Sun)
• The Law of the Overstocked Haberdashery (Heinz M. Kabutz/javaspecialists)
• Concurrency Testing Java Apps (Frank Cohen/TheServerSide)

Jack Shirazi

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