Matt Walker

Parallel programming in Java is becoming easier with tools such as the fork/join framework, Pervasive DataRush, Terracotta, and Hadoop. This article gives a high-level description of each approach, pointing you in the right direction to begin writing parallel applications of your own. Boiling the Ocean of Data Companies today are swimming in data. The increasing ease with which data can be collected, combined with the decreasing cost of storing and managing it, means huge amounts of information are now accessible to anyone with the inclination. And many businesses do have the desire. Internet search engines index billions of pages of content on the web. Banks analyze credit card transactions looking for fraud. While these may be industry-specific examples, there are others that apply broadly: business intelligence, predictive analytics, and regulatory compliance to n... (more)

It's a Multi-Core World: Let the Data Flow

The multi-core buzz is everywhere. Pick up a newspaper and the local electronics mega-store is advertising multi-core desktops and laptops to the consumer. Interesting, but what does it mean to the everyday Java programmer? Maybe nothing. If you live in the application server world writing EJB-based applications your application server does most of the heavy lifting for you. It handles concurrency just fine. But that doesn't cover all applications. Multi-core technology will especially affect applications that must process large amounts of data in a non-transactional (outside of ... (more)