JSON instead of Java Serialization: The solution?

We start recognizing that Serialization is not such a good idea. It is cool and can really work on a wide range of objects, even including complex and cyclic reference graphs. And it was essential for some older Java frameworks like EJB and RMI, which allowed remote access to Java objects and classes. But it …

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Devoxx UA and Devoxx BE 2019

In 2019 I visited Devoxx UA in Kiev and Devoxx BE in Antwerp. Traveling was actually a little story by itself, so for now we can just assume that I magically was at the locations of DevoxxUA and DevoxxBE. In Kiew I attended the following talks: Probabilistic data structures in nutshell (in Ukrainian) [Oleksandra Kulyk] …

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Checked Exceptions in Java

In Java it is possible to declare a method with a „throws“-clause. For certain exceptions, that are not extending „RuntimeException“ or „Error“, this is actually required. What looked like a good idea 25 years ago has proven to be a dead end. I do not know of any other major programming language that opts for …

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Devoxx Kiew 2018

In the end of 2018 the number of conferences is kind of high. A great highlight is the Devoxx BE in Antwerp. But it has now five partner conferences in London, Paris, Krakow, Morocco and Kiev. So I decided to have a look at the one in Kiev. How was it in comparison to the …

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Devoxx 2017

I was lucky to get a chance to visit Devoxx in Antwerp the sixth time in a row. As always there were interesting talks to listen to. Some issues that were visible across different talks: Java 9 is now out and Java 8 will soon go into the first steps of deprecation. The step of …

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Conference Talks

Referring to the Swiss Perl Workshop, it is now time to collect all the conference talks that I have given so far and that have been uploaded as video. Lightning Talk: Why Computer calculate wrong (done with Scala; ScalaX 2015) Why computer calculate wrong (done with Perl and Perl 6; Alpine Perl Workshop 2016) Lightning …

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UTF-16 Strings in Java

Deutsch Strings in Java and many other JVM-languages consist of Unicode content and are encoded as utf-16. It was fantastic to already consider Unicode when introducing Java in the 90es and to make it the only reasonable way to use strings, so there is no temptation to start with a „US-ASCII“-version of a software that …

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How to create ISO Date String

It is a more and more common task that we need to have a date or maybe date with time as String. There are two reasonable ways to do this: * We may want the date formatted in the users Locale, whatever that is. * We want to use a generic date format, that is …

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Conversion of ASCII-graphics to PNG or JPG

Images are usually some obscure binary files. Their most common formats, PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIF are well documented and supported by many software tools. Libraries and APIs exist for accessing these formats, but also a phantastic free interactive software like Gimp. The compression rate that can reasonably be achieved when using these format is …

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How to recover the Carry Bit

As frequent readers might have observed, I like the concept of the Carry Bit as it allows for efficient implementations of long integer arithmetic, which I would like to use as default integer type for most application development. And unfortunately such facilities are not available in high level languages like C and Java. But it …

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