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
Excluding Gradle Tasks with a Name Pattern
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gradle build files in Android projects, which probably isn’t a big surprise given that I’m working on a book called Gradle Recipes for Android (coming soon to all your better ebook stores and (who knows?) maybe an actual, physical bookstore somewhere (but probably not), but you can… Read More
Retrofitting Groovy
I’m teaching an Android development class this week, and one of our primary references is the book Android 6 for Programmers, 3rd edition, which was released last December. One of the examples in the book accesses the Open Weather Map RESTful web service and builds a UI around the results, which is pretty much the… Read More
A Groovy approach to npm-gate
Recently the JavaScript community experienced a serious disruption when a developer removed one of his deployed libraries from the central npm server, an event now being referred to as npm-gate. I don’t want to get into the various ethical, moral, or legal issues about that here. Rather, I want to show how trivially the missing functionality… Read More
The Shadow Knows Gradle
Someone recently complained on Twitter that the so-called Shadow plugin for Gradle, written by the inestimable John Engleman, no longer worked on Gradle 2.11 or 2.12. Commenters were quick to point out that the latest version (1.2.3) of the plugin did work. I thought I’d put together this quick blog post to demonstrate that it… Read More