Some musings about my personal history with inheritance and interfaces, solicited by the release of the Go language this week.

Flex 4 introduces a new API to define effects for rich-client applications. This article provides an overview of new features in Flex 4's effects and animation-related APIs.

Google released today a series of open-source libraries that make it easier to work with highly optimized JavaScript. Closure Tools includes a JavaScript compiler, a set of utility libraries, and a client-side JavaScript template engine.

At its X Innovate 2009 Developer Conference, PayPal announced today a new platform and APIs that allow developers to integrate a variety of payment types into applications. In an interview with Artima, Damon Hougland, senior director of the PayPal Platform, talks about integrating payments into end-user applications.

Traffic Server is an open-source HTTP proxy that has been in production at Yahoo and other large Web sites for several years, and is capable of handling over 35,000 requests per second.

YouTrack is a new bug and issue tracker that provides a simple, keyboard focused UI, with an intelligent, context-sensitive search box, to speed up locating and modifying issue and bug status.

Amazon released today a relational database service as part of Amazon Web Services. The service provides a cloud-based equivalent of a MySQL 5.1 database engine, and is priced based on usage.

Today I gave a presentation about ScalaTest at a local company. I showed ways ScalaTest integrates with JUnit and makes it easier to do some things that are harder to do with JUnit in Java. It made me curious to find out what JUnit users would say are their actual pain points today with JUnit.

In a recent blog post, Naresh Jain summarizes a conference discussion about code smell, highlighting some of the worst code smells, and some that, if eliminated, can bring order to a putrefying codebase.

VisualVM is an open-source application that monitors and presents visually rich metrics about Java applications running in a JVM. Based on the NetBeans platform, the latest VisualVM release features a sampling CPU and memory profiler plugin, among other features.

In a recent paper, Miguel Garcia, Anastasia Izmaylova, and Sibylle Schupp describe an effort to add type-safe, language-integrated database querying capabilities to Scala.

In this interview with Artima, JetBrains' Dmitry Jemerov discusses how he hopes developers will benefit from the decision to open-source Intellij IDEA.

In a pair of recent blog posts, Uncle Bob and Martin Fowler discuss the types of technical debt almost every project incurs, and debate whether messy code can be considered a kind of technical debt.

In a recent blog post, Aleksander Stensby shows examples of how Google Collections, the newly open-sourced Guava library, and static imports can reduce boilerplate Java code.

ScalaTest is an open-source testing framework for Scala and Java code that promises to increase testing productivity with high-level test abstractions. It supports a multiple of testing styles, and integrates with popular Java testing tools.

New features in Adobe's desktop runtime include the ability to interact with native OS processes, detect the addition or removal of mass storage devices, locally record sound, create sockets, better accessibility, and an open document API.