Artima has release a PrePrint edition of Akka Concurrency, by Derek Wyatt. This book aims not only to teach you the ins and outs of Akka, but show you new ways to think about your software--to focus more on the business of your software and less on the concurrency of it.

Artima has release a PrePrint edition of Monadic Design Patterns for the Web, by L. G. Meredith. This book aims to demystify the monad. Using web applications as an example, this book will show you how you can apply monadic design patterns to help you solve practical, real-world programming problems.

In this article you will learn how to get started building web applications with Play 2, Scala, Squeryl, JSON, CoffeeScript, and jQuery. You will also learn how to test the application with ScalaTest and then deploy the application on the cloud with Heroku.

This article addresses the ways in which JRebel has made an impact on how developers spend their day coding.

Abstraction is a question of less over more. But is it also a question of high over low? It turns out that the common way of describing abstractions in terms of high-level and low-level hides a number of assumptions, some of which suggest that we often look at abstraction the wrong way up (or down).

What can you learn from testing? When you look beyond the red and the green, the fail and the pass, you can learn a lot more about the nature of the code and the nature of the problem domain. And there is a lot to learn — software development is called knowledge work for a reason.

What is the largest double that could in theory be produced by Math.random()? In this newsletter, we look at ways to calculate this based on the 48-bit random generator available in standard Java. We also prove why in a single-threaded program, (int)(Random.nextDouble() + 1) can never be rounded up to 2.

I'm not talking about the early adopters writing obscure code here -- that can probably be solved with a suitable style guide. I just debugged my way through an example that should have been trivial but I only figured out because:

In order for HTML5 to become the true user interface technology of the future, servers must be able to transparently push data to clients. People have been trying to do this for a long time, and WebSockets look like they will solve the problem once and for all.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a little quiz to my readers of The Java Specialists' Newsletter. No one managed to figure out what the code does without running it. Some managed to explain the result once they had run it. Perfect quiz for weeding out those job applicants you don't like. Especially in the banking industry. Enough hints :-)

My friend James Ward was explaining some of the struggles he had learning Scala, in particular partial functions.

Over a career, good programmers spend much more of their time in professional education than in their college classes. Much of this professional training is tied up with certification programs.

My JavaOne day three was just sessions. And the concert! But the sessions were good ones.

Accusoft Pegasus announces the acquisition of Adeptol, a leader in document viewing technology, and substantially all of its assets.

Day Two at JavaOne brought a few more interesting announcements.

The day one keynote convinced everyone that Java is moving forward. There are good things happening, good things on the horizon, and a few surprise changes-in-direction from Oracle.