Yesterday, after four years of vacillation and procrastination and occasional modification, I finally got the preface of my next book, Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design Without Compromise, into a form with which I'm happy. Eight pages in four years; at that rate the full book will take me 150 years!

I'm not sure what's worse here: the fact that some of my data is going to go away, or the fact that I found this out almost by accident. Someone is going to get burned by this.

Artima has published its second book, Flex 4 Fun by Chet Haase. This book covers the graphics and animation parts of Flex 4: the fun stuff! Along the way it gives many insights and tips on how to use graphics and animation to create better users experiences.

Read Douglas Rushkoff's "Why I Left My Publisher in Order to Publish a Book" first.

Komodo IDE version 6 radically changed the design of one of the key aspects of what makes it an IDE, not just an editor - Projects. There have been a lot of unhappy comments from the user community. How much consultation should a company provide?

Dick Wall's talk turns out to be a treasure trove of useful tidbits, and a great introduction to Scala that whets my appetite, big time.

An overview of upcoming features in Java.

A few weeks ago, I wondered if generics were going to be the death of Java. But today, I began to wonder if Oracle might just manage to do it in a lot more quickly.

This umbrella article encompasses newsworthy items gleaned from the show, with pointers to the content pieces.

JavaOne is coming up in September and I am thinking about my to-know-more-about list. I am thinking JavaFX, Executors, and performance tuning applications and tools. Somewhere in between I have to make time to lookup friends and connect with fellow programmers. I am also curious to see what's up now that Sun is Oracle.

plac is much more than a command-line arguments parser. You can use it to implement interactive interpreters (both on a local machine on a remote server) as well as batch interpreters. It features a doctest-like mode, the ability to launch commands in parallel, and more. And it is easy to use too!

It's been taking forever to open-source Java. Oracle's lawsuit with Google makes me wonder if it's ever going to happen.

Removing the hype around the multicore (non) revolution and some (hopefully) sensible comment about threads ad other forms of concurrency.

In which I argue that (a) Generics have done egregious harm to both the elegance and readability of the Java language and, (b) they prove by example that static type checking is a linguistic dead-end. Are you persuaded? Do you agree? Read on...

A closer look at how Groovy builders help with creational code in complex API's, using the Java3d API as a fun example.