With the introduction of lambdas in Java (not so) recently, some argue that Groovy lost some of its thunder, as closures are now first class citizens in the JDK. However, as I’m about to show, while lambda’s pushed the Java language a great deal forward, Groovy still makes a lot of things incredibly easy (and […]
I’m going to spread some lovin’ today for the widely-used yet less appreciated feature in Groovy which allows creating a Java bean and setting its properties in one line. Especially when dealing with unit tests this saves me a great deal of time and frustration. If you ever worked with “pure” (??) Java beans, then […]
I came across this article on Tech Crunch today (AI accountability needs action now, say UK MPs) and wanted to share some thoughts on it. It sounds to me like once again Europe, and UK in this case, is getting cold feet about AI and big data and the interesting results this renders sometimes. Because […]
If you ever programmed in Groovy language, you probably “enjoyed” (maybe without realising) the joys of DefaultGroovyMethods. What you probably don’t realise is that you can override these methods to customize your classes — and occasionally generate some code that’s not that easy to read. (Do you remember the old C++ way of overriding operators […]
Nicolas Fränkel published a blog entry recently talking about “Type-safe annotations” in Java — which trigger my thoughts on the same matter, and voila, there’s this post as a result of it. This is in fact my 2 cents on the matter — and as such I’d recommend you read Nicolas’ point of view too […]
If you use gradle and you took the path to write your own gradle plugins (try it, it’s fun!) to make your build process more … “enjoyable”, then this might come in handy one day. I have worked on a few gradle plugins, some of them inside the Netflix Nebula suite, some of them outside Netflix […]
If you’ve been doing “stuff” with Java 8 for a while I’m sure you’ve stepped into lambdas territory and the joys of succinct code it allows to be written. And if you are like me you probably found yourself using lambda’s everywhere you are confronted with a single-method interface. Which is allowed. In fact it’s […]
With Java 8, Oracle introduced the concept of “default methods” in interfaces (and if you really haven’t heard of this — wtf?? — you can read more here about it: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/defaultmethods.html). This argue some is a step towards multiple inheritance and as such should be banished from the oh, so pure! Java language. Others point out […]
I have been using for a while the about.me website and their mobile app Intro by about.me. (I use an Android phone, and as such I am supplying here the link to the Google Play appstore, however I’m sure they have an iOS one too you’ll have to search in the App Store for it.) For […]
I wrote recently about the new niceties in the Map interface that Java 8 brought to light where I’m highlighting in particular 2 new methods: getOrDefault and computeIfAbsent (see my previous post here about it). These provide a cleaner (and as it turns out faster too!) way of retrieving values from a Map instance. However, […]
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