In a recent Sun Developer Network article, Ed Ort explains why the JVM needed the new invokedynamic instruction, and how this new JVM feature works under the hood.

In a recent blog post, Fan language creator Brian Frank discusses the different design trade-offs these two statically-typed JVM languages have followed.

Rich-client technologies permeate not only browser-based applications, but the more traditional desktop client as well. In this interview with Artima, Rob Christensen, Adobe's product manager for AIR, discusses the reasons for creating rich desktop applications, and how AIR enables developers to deploy their apps to users' desktops.

Rich-client technologies permeate not only browser-based applications, but the more traditional desktop client as well. In this interview with Artima, Rob Christensen, Adobe's product manager for AIR, discusses the reasons for creating rich desktop applications, and how AIR enables developers to deploy their apps to users' desktops.

Concepts were to be an important part of the upcoming C++0x standard as a way to simplify specifying template constraints. This week, however, the C++0x committee voted against including Concepts in the new standard. Danny Kalev analyzes the causes of this change of heart, as well as possible futures for Concepts, in a recent article.

> I have never used> a "nice" language for production code - no Pascal, ML,> Lisp, Haskell. It was always something "ugly": Fortran,> Assembly, C++, Javascript, Perl, C#. The queston is not> what is beautiful or even good - it is only what can get> the job done in the ugly real world.Well, I don't want to plug Scala here, but that's actually...

In a recent blog post, Michael Feathers contrasts the relatively free culture of the Ruby community with cultures built around languages that appear to be more patronizing to the programmer.

SoftwarePearls recently released CollectionSpy, a profiler exclusively focused on Java Collections framework classes. In this interview with Artima, CollectionSpy lead developer Laurence Vanhelsuwé discusses common collections-related coding errors.

In a recent blog post, Sun's Tim Bray discusses design tradeoffs when handling RESTful HTTP requests that can take a long time to return.

> Having said that, pair programming in general does not> work - programmers are (generally) asocial creatures and> don't work together well.In my admittedly limited experience doing pair programming, I never had this issue. Yes, someone has to "drive" the process, just because that person's sitting at the keyboard. But that's not an issue of...

In a recent blog post, James Strachan explains why he thinks Scala is the best candidate to replace Java as a general-purpose programming language on the JVM.

Pair programming, one of the key tenets of agile development, is also one of the more controversial agile practices. In a recent article, Elliotte Rusty Harold explains why pair programming, while not a silver bullet, can potentially result in big productivity gains.

FlexUnit 4, the latest version of the Adobe-developed open-source unit testing framework for Flex and ActionScript 3, includes annotation-based tests, better test setup and teardown, Hamcrest matchers, and improved support for asynchronous testing.

The latest NetBeans release provides Kenai-based project collaboration, a Maven library dependency graph viewer, PHPUnit support, support for the Shoulda Ruby testing framework, improved C and C++ refactorings, and a host of other new features.

In a recent interview, Alex McGuire describes how his team has been moving to Scala, and how they can interface with a 300,000-line Java codebase, in a mission-critical application.