Cyclomatic complexity (CC) measures code complexity by showing how many different paths code execution can take. Studies on code quality have shown correlation between CC and bugs in a given piece of code, and CC has been used to complement code coverage metrics. A recent article shows how to measure CC in Java code with open-source tools.

PMD is an open-source project that helps analyze Java source files, reports on possible bugs, dead code, suboptimal code, cyclomatic complexity, and is highly configurable with a series of rules. The latest PMD release adds more code checking rules, including rules for working with JSF.

Last week's ServerSide Java Symposium concluded with a panel about the futures of Java that included half a dozen Java thought leaders. The discussion focused on what Java can learn from scripting frameworks, such as Rails, where open-source is leading Java, and why open-source is not free.

FindBugs is an open source tool for Java that performs static analysis to locate potential bugs in your code. FindBugs is one of a number of open source static analysis tools for Java, which you can quickly put to work to help you improve quality.

In a recent article, Brian Goetz differentiates between memory and non-memory resources used by a Java application, and shows that garbage collection does not handle non-memory resources. Such resources must be managed by the programmer, and Brian demonstrates a few strategies for how to do this well.

Swing is enjoying a renaissance, thanks in part to renewed interest in rich-client applications, and also because of new frameworks that aim to ease Swing development. One such framework, JAXX, lets you describe a Swing UI via XML, and even allows CSS stylesheets to define the appearance of Swing components.

In this developerWorks article, Ron Bodkin presents practical guidelines for incorporating aspects more deeply into your development practice. He describes various stages of AOP adoption, offers examples of learning applications and guidelines for success at each stage, and provides a survey of the AOP techniques and applications.

Apple's Zero Configuration Networking ("Rendezvous" or "Bonjour") facilitates spontaneous discovery and communication not only between devices, but also between software services running on different network nodes on a LAN. A recent article looks at how to register and discover services with ZeroConf's Java APIs.

The NetBeans project has released Jackpot, a module that helps you reengineer Java source code by safely making sweeping changes to potentially large bodies of code. It includes a rules language in which you can specify transformations.

A popular way to scale up a Java application is to distribute its processing on a cluster of independent servers. Such distribution requires software tools that help split an application's work into smaller pieces and coordinate work between cluster nodes. The open-source Java Parallel Processing Framework aims to provide such tools.

There has been a lot of discussion around the net, including at Artima, about Gosling's recent comments concerning PHP, Ruby, and other languages. But until now, the full transcript and context wasn't available.

While the stateless model of client-server interaction allows a servlet to service requests from any client, it also puts the burden of state management on the developer. Continuations, a feature of Ruby and other languages, can help ease state management chores. In a recent article Bruce Tate shows how to use this technique in Java.

Grizzly is an NIO-based HTTP front-end of the GlassFish J2EE server project. Project lead Jean-Francois Arcand compares this NIO-based HTTP server with the most recent Tomcat HTTP implementations, showing that using non-blocking sockets allow a server to scale up.

In J2EE 5, a significant amount of glue code is required to use JSF and EJB 3.0 together, and that glue code often has to deal with difficult application issues. The JBoss Seam projects aims to simplify that interaction by bringing EJBs closer to the Web tier.

Elliotte Rusty Harold writes that "Many designers ... are now producing CSS layouts that are almost as inflexible and inaccessible as the table based layouts they replace," and makes a suggestion that will make your pages more accessible.