Roy's Technology Diary

I recently discovered some little-known ways to use a GMail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time. Actually, when you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com"; here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still continue getting your mails: Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was yourusername @gmail.com, you could send mail to yourusername +friends@gmail.com or yourusername +mailinglists@gmail.com. Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- Google mail just ignores them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy...

The Simple XML serialization framework has released version 1.2. Simple is a serialization framework for Java that intends to provide an XML serialization framework that requires no configuration or mappings to serialize objects bi-directionally; i.e. to and from standard XML. Below is a list of some of the capabilities of the framework. Simple framework with powerful capabilities The framework used to provide XML serialization is simple to use and revolves around several annotations an a single persister object used to read and write objects to and from XML. Both serialization and deserialization are fully supported. It requires absolutely no configuration Unlike many of the XML frameworks for Java there are no mappings or configuration required to serialize objects regardless of its complexity, not even code to establish mappings. Everything is done at runtime, only annotations are required to perform the object to XML structure. The XML schema is represented using field and method a...

In many texts String is cited as the ultimate benchmark of Java's various immutable classes. Well, I'm sure you'd have to think the other way once you have read this article. To start with, let's get back to the books and read the definition of immutability. The Wikipedia defines it as follows - 'In object-oriented and functional programming, an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created.' I personally find this definition good as it mentions that an immutable instance's state should not be allowed to be modified after it's construction. Now keeping this in the back of our minds, let's decompile Java's standard String implementation and peep into the hashCode() method - public int hashCode() { int h = hash; if (h == 0) { int off = offset; char val[] = value; int len = count; for (int i = 0; i h = 31*h + val[off++]; } hash = h; } return h; } A detailed ...