Last week I received an email asking about a table Of contents for my new Kotlin Cookbook, saying they couldn’t find one either on the O’Reilly Media site or on Amazon. It’s a lot easier to make a decision about buying a recipe book if you have a list of recipes. When I checked last… Read More
Kotlin Palindrome Checker
This post, based on code from my new Kotlin Cookbook, shows how to write a palindrome checker in Kotlin. Along the way it discusses raw strings and regular expressions, writing functions as single statements, and creating an extension function on String. First, a quick definition. A palindrome is a string whose characters are the same… Read More
A Deep Dive into the KotlinVersion Class
Getting the current Kotlin version is easy, but the actual KotlinVersion class is much more interesting. This post shows how to get the Kotlin version programmatically, but then looks at the details of the KotlinVersion class, including how it demonstrates a great way to write an equals method and more. Note that this demo is… Read More
Java 11 HttpClient, Gson, Gradle, and Modularization
This post describes a simple system that uses the new HttpClient class that comes with Java 11 to access a RESTful web service. After demonstrating basic functionality, changes are made to parse the results using Gson, and even modularize the code and have it work with Gradle. The goal is to provide an example for… Read More
Managing Your Manager: The Video Course
I’m a regular speaker on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour (I’m now entering my ninth year, which I can hardly believe), and one of the talks I’ve given there for many years is called “Managing Your Manager”. It’s been one of my most successful talks, and I’ve given several versions of it, including as… Read More
Java 8 Constructor Refs (In All Their Glory)
[Note: my last post announced my new book, Modern Java Recipes, is now available from O’Reilly publishers in Early Release form. As a sample, I included a discussion of the Predicate interface, one of the new functional interfaces in the the java.util.function package. In this post, I highlight constructor references, which are discussed in another… Read More
Modern Java Recipes now in Early Release
My latest book, Modern Java Recipes, is now available in Early Release form! If you have a Safari account (the online book repository from O’Reilly), you can add it to your bookshelf at any time. Otherwise, you can get it directly from http://shop.oreilly.com or even at Amazon.com. There are only three chapters in the Early… Read More
Days Between Dates in Java 8
I would like to address a problem that is quite topical at the moment: calculating the number of days between two events. The new Date-Time API in Java 8 makes this process much simpler than it used to be. The Date-Time API includes the interface java.time.temporal.TemporalUnit, which is implemented by the enum ChronoUnit in the… Read More
Making Java 8 Groovier: A few annotated examples
In a couple of weeks, I’m giving two talks at talk at the 2016 JavaOne conference in San Francisco. One of them is called “Groovy and Java 8: Making Java Better“. I’m building examples in preparation for the conference, and as the Groovy community is good about correcting my errors in a friendly way, I… Read More
Fun with Time Zones in Java 8
[Note: Revised based on suggestions in the comments.] They say that one way to identify a software developer is to whisper the word “timezone” in their ear and see if they shudder. That’s certainly true for me, though my reaction is based more on travel and trying to arrange conference calls across time zones than… Read More