Don’t return null; use a tail call

Why should an object-oriented programmer care about tail-call elimination? Isn’t that just another esoteric functional programming concept? Maybe not. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, a common technique for performing a subroutine call worked this way: The caller stored the address at which it wished to resume execution in a known place (e.g. adjacent to [...]

Jesse Tilly at Memphis JUG

This month’s Memphis Java Users’ Group meeting featured Jesse Tilly of IBM Rational Software, who spoke to us on static analysis. He will be doing a more product-intensive session, “What is IBM® Rational® Software Analyzer® Telling Me?”, at the upcoming IBM Rational Software Conference. (Don’t be misled by all those “circle-R”s; I just linked to [...]

BuilderBuilder: The Model in Java

This post will describe a tiny Java model for implementing the BuilderBuilder task. It is simple almost to the point of crudity, because the goal of the series is to compare languages and styles, not to produce production-ready sample code. This post will focus on the parts of the overall data flow highlighted below: The [...]

BuilderBuilder: The Task

Short version: Given minimal information (package, class name, and collection of fields described by name and type), produce Java source for a data transfer class, including a static inner class that functions as a builder. The data flow of this task looks like this: Given data in a specified input format, a loader will consume [...]

Jared Richardson at Memphis JUG

I’ve been very happy with the progress of the Memphis Java Users’ Group under Matt Stine‘s leadership, and last night kicked it up a notch, with a visit by Jared Richardson, author of Career 2.0 and Ship It!, and NFJS speaker! Jared’s talk on refactoring your career was full of practical advice, engagingly presented … [...]