Apache NetBeans 30 Released
The MetBeans IDE has been updated: NetBeans 30 has been released. This is a regular quarterly update, and includes some useful support for Java 26 and some enterprise features, but is mostly an incremental change.
Latest Dispatches
Being Wrong in the Same Direction
This is a working example of using red/green testing to fix a bug - one that starts in the issue description and lives in the code. You can fix the issue, but the bug remains because it's part of an unexamined specification. Testing - and caring - are the fix.
Slidev - Live Audience Polling for Presentations
Github user asmo0dey has created an application that provides live audience polling for slidev presentations, using docker, Spring, vue, and either PostgreSQL or H2. It's got a lot of benefit for presentations, of course, but it also looks designed well.
Kirk Pepperdine ships GC Log Analysis tool
Kirk Pepperdine has released gcsee-jma, a GC analysis tool for Java. Kirk's been a leader in performance analysis for Java for decades, and a tool from his work is welcomed. It's got excellent, clear, fast features, and looks to be incredibly useful.
Developer Experience is a Performance Feature
Christian Rackerseder makes the case that developer experience is a performance feature. The stronger version of his claim is that developer experience is an epistemic feature. Good performance is just one of the things that falls out when your team can finally see what it has been shipping.
David M. Lloyd: VarHandle fundamentals
David M. Lloyd has another piece on modern reflection, this time on VarHandle - and as usual, it's highly informative. It replaces a lot of Unsafe usage, and demonstrates quite a bit of atomic access fundamentals as well, and it opens up offheap access, too.
The Barrier for Entry
AI code is not the enemy. Ideas used to be valued against the weeks we'd spend building them, and most got shelved before we ever found out if they were any good. Now we get to find out in an afternoon.
JavaScript server-side interoperability with rcompat
JavaScript has no standard library, so reading a file looks different in Node, Deno, and Bun. rcompat is a thin abstraction that gives you one API and uses runtime keys to dispatch to each runtime's native implementation underneath, with branded identity checks and structured errors thrown in.
"From Stringly to Strongly Typed" - refined design
Rasmus Ros wrote "From Stringly to Strongly Typed," an article describing a Kotlin library that solves one half of typed schema access: how to read the data. But data isn't just accessible; it's related to other data, and that half he's deferring to a future post. The deferred half is well-trodden ground, and the reasons we don't tread it are worth knowing.