Saturday, October 25, 2008

JetBrains Seeder Program

JetBrains has recently started the JetBrains Seeder Program, an attempt to build a volunteer evangelism network for their products. I'm not sure I'd make a great evangelist, since my use of IntelliJ IDEA has mostly been limited to my experimentation with Groovy. I might join the program anyway, since IntelliJ is a great IDE (especially for Groovy) and I'm curious to see how the seeder program works.

Update: I decided that I'd already signed up for enough programs like this without taking full advantage of them. As a side note, I've been trying out NetBeans 6.5 for my Groovy and Grails projects and have been pleasantly surprised. I'll have a dilemma on my hands when it comes time to either renew or drop my IntelliJ license in April.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

ConcurrentLinkedHashMap as In-Memory Cache

For my work, I was looking for a thread-safe equivalent of LinkedHashMap that would work well as the basis for an in-memory cache.  I was hoping that such a class might be showing up in the JSR166y project, but 'twas not to be.  After that, I tried googling for ConcurrentLinkedHashMap (my previous search had been for "concurrent LinkedHashMap" [minus the quotes]) and stumbled upon a small project at Google Code devoted to exactly what I was looking for: ConcurrentLinkedHashMap.  I've been looking over the code.  It seems pretty good and I might be helping out with it, but I'm not an expert with concurrency and the Java Memory Model to the extent really needed.  I'm in touch with the main author, who seems very amenable to suggestions and corrections.  We'll see how it works out.