JetBrains has announced the general availability of JetGroovy 1.5. The popular Groovy development plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA has been extended with a number of highly anticipated features, such as Groovy-aware refactorings, Groovy code assistance, Groovy debugging, and improved support for Grails development.

Functional programming languages are enjoying a renaissance. Even if not intending to use a functional language for daily work, learning such a language can improve one's programming style.

In a recent blog post, Terracotta's Ari Zilka explains how visualization can help better understand concurrency problems.

The renewed popularity of functional languages opens up new possibilities for defining domain-specific languages. In a recent article, Debasish Ghosh describes the use of parser combinators in Scala as a way to implement a DSL that can work with any Java code.

ICEfaces is an open-source JSF library supported by ICEsoft. The latest ICEfaces release includes support for asynchronous, non-blocking I/O, portlet-style deployment of ICEfaces components, and several new JSF components. ICEsoft's Ken Fyten discusses the latest features in an interview with Artima.

A business owner at a workshop I held made the very disturbing comment that he thought that 70% of programmers were "rowing backward," doing things that you had to fix in order to keep the boat moving in the forward direction.

In a series of predictions for the future of Java EE, Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring project, shares his opinions on de facto versus de jure standards, the role of the JCP, and on why Java EE 6 will usher in renewed app server competition.

Managers need to measure the productivity of their employees, including that of developers. But choosing the right metrics to measure developer productivity is fraught with peril, says Steve McConnell in an article evaluating commonly used developer productivity measures.

In a wide-ranging interview with MSDN's Howard Dierking, Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of the C++ programming language, shares his views on domain-specific languages, loosely-typed systems, languages that support multiple dispatch, and on code readability and programming style.

A key engineer on Sun's next-generation JRE project, Ethan Nicholas initiated many of the changes that led to a slimmer and more user-friendly JRE in Java Update 10. In a Sun Developer Network article, Nicholas shares more details of what's new in the latest JRE version.

Improved support for applets is one way Sun's Java Update 10 promises to make client-side Java developers' lives easier. Geertjan Wielenga draws attention to key new applet-related JRE features, and ponders what they may mean for the future of applets.

Wizards are a common user interaction pattern to help collect complex and interdependent pieces of data from a user. Tim Boudreau has been working on an open-source wizard framework for Swing. A recent JavaWorld article provides a detailed tutorial on how to create wizards with Boudreau's Wizard API.

For entrepreneurial software developers weighing the risks and benefits inherent in the mobile market, getting product to the customer is a key concern. It's clear you won't get much help from carriers, who seem to be convinced that software is just something they give away in order to help sell phone plans. That's the bad news.

Functional programming techniques often provide elegant solutions to common problems. In a recent blog post, Daniel Spiewak introduces Scala's Option type, and shows how it can provide a convenient way to return meaningful values from a method.

The JRuby project released its latest update to the JVM-based Ruby 1.8 implementation. A key feature of this release is performance that now exceeds, in some cases, that of the native Ruby interpreter.