Described as a multicore-friendly, lightweight parallel framework, fork/join uses the strategy of recursively splitting a task into smaller subtasks; forking the subtasks into separate processes or threads, so that they run in parallel on multiple cores; and joining all subtasks to compose a result to return. Expected to be added to Java 7, it will boost the ease of writing parallel programs in Java.

A few weeks ago Filip Hanik and I gave the second in a series of webinars on Optimising and Tuning Apache Tomcat. A recording of the webinar and a copy of the slides can be obtained from the webinars section of the SpringSource website. The same page has links for all the previous SpringSource webinars, as well as the Covalent webinar archive. We weren't able to get to all of the questions during the Q&A session so, as promised, here are the remaining questions and our answers.

A common question on Wicket mailing lists is “Why doesn’t my ListView work as expected in a Form?”. There can be many possible answers, but the core issue is that ListView was never designed to work as a form component. ListView is great when it comes to displaying a list of elements, but in order to be a good citizen in Wicket’s form processing a list editor should possess the following features:

They call this continuation-passing style (though callback passing style might be more appropriate). Reminds me of monads.

Building a site that can withstand a huge surge of traffic on one day takes considerable planning and work, as well as a little creativity. Collis has shared with me some of the inner workings of the Blog Action Day site and how they built the website to provide a platform for action, bring a community together and handle torrents of traffic on one day.

In this newsletter we examine what happens when a ReadWriteLock is swamped with too many reader or writer threads. If we are not careful, we can cause starvation of the minority in some versions of Java.

Simple example of using BindingUtils in ActionScript 3.

I’ve used the term “drinking from the fire hose” when describing my first days at Microsoft. However, I believe that a lot of our customers feel this way when approaching the plethora of options for web application development on the Microsoft stack.

People are on the look out for the next big thing, and the alphadevs are all sniffing around the Functional. Scala, Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, ML, F#, Fortree, Lisp, Clojure, it keeps on going.

Dependency injection is a common pattern in enterprise applications, and several popular frameworks sprang up in the Java universe to solve the problems associated with dependency injection. Indeed, sometimes a key reason for using an enterprise framework, such as Spring or Guice, is motivated by those frameworks' support for dependency injection, allowing loser coupling of an application's components