IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Health Center is a tool for monitoring a running Java application. It reports on all aspects of system health via charts, graphs, and tables, and it makes recommendations for fixing problems. The Health Center includes an extremely low-overhead method profiler, a garbage-collection visualizer, a locking profiler to identify contention bottlenecks, and a configuration explorer. Find out how you can use this tool to diagnose and fix performance, configuration, and stability issues in your applications.

The Memory Dump Diagnostic for Java (MDD4J) tool helps you diagnose
memory leaks and other excessive memory consumption problems in applications
running in IBM Java Virtual Machines (JVMs). This article introduces you to
MDD4J and shows you how to use its sophisticated analysis engine and user
interface to peer into the Java heap so you can see which objects are
consuming the most amount of memory. (IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal)

In this Practically Groovy article, Scott Davis tackles a topic that strikes fear into most server-side Java developers: Swing. As you’ll learn, Groovy’s SwingBuilder takes some of the sting out of this powerful yet complex GUI framework.

A query for persistent Java objects is typesafe if a compiler can verify it for syntactic correctness. Version 2.0 of the Java Persistence API (JPA) introduces the Criteria API, which brings the power of typesafe queries to Java applications for the first time and provides a mechanism for constructing queries dynamically at run time. This article describes how to write dynamic, typesafe queries using the Criteria API and the closely associated Metamodel API.

In this first half of a two-part article focusing on memcached and Grails,
author James Goodwill introduces you to the open source caching solution memcached.
Topics covered in this article include installation, configuration, memcached client
commands, and evaluating the effectiveness of your cache. Unlike articles about using
memcached with a language-specific client, this one focuses on direct interaction with
the memcached server. The goal is to give you the tools you need to monitor your
instance of memcached as well as to prepare you for the second half of the article, in which you will integrate memcached into a Grails application.

Globalization has had an enormous impact on our lives and cultures. As a
result, translation is becoming an increasingly important tool to enhance
understanding between cultures. Organizations try to use Web technologies with
different languages, scripts, and cultures, and developers search for new
technologies that will help them create efficient applications as quickly as
possible. Fortunately, JavaServer Faces (JSF) simplifies life for application developers, making it
possible for them to focus on the view without needing to know the underlying
markup or scripts. ICEfaces, an integrated Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)
application framework, enables Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application developers to easily create and deploy thin-client,
rich Internet applications in pure Java code. This tutorial describes how to develop Web applications using
JSF with the translation option.

Writing GUIs in program code can often lead to messy design choices, which
in turn results in a blurring between business logic and UI code. Discover how to create a
declarative XML UI tag set with an accompanying Java(TM) framework that parses, validates,
constructs, and finally binds the declared GUI components to business logic at runtime.

Scott Davis continues the discussion about Groovy metaprogramming with an in-depth look at
the @Delegate annotation, which blurs the distinctions between
data type and behavior and static and dynamic typing.

Nowadays, with the widespread use and deployment of Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools, you don’t generally have to think too hard about such arcane issues as composite keys. Normally, the choice of key design can be a simple integer, and this can be left with confidence to the tooling. Occasionally, you come across a situation where a composite key is required, and you need a strategy for this. This tip shows you how to implement composite keys with JPA and Hibernate.