Java Troubleshooting and Diagnostics Guide and Concurrency Utilities

After the Harrisburg Java User's Group meeting tonight, two items in particular came up in the post-presentation discussions which I am mentioning here mainly for my own reference, but will likely be valuable to anyone reading this doing Java programming.

The Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0 Trouble-Shooting and Diagnostic Guide is a comprehensive guide to the tools that are available as part of JDK5 to analyze Java programs. Interestingly many of these tools do not exist on Windows, but they are in OS X as well as the mentioned Linux and Solaris.

Available as part of the stock Java 5 standard libraries, the JSR 166 Concurrency Utilities allow the building of many common concurrency models without the complication of doing such programming from scratch. Concurrent programming is becoming important as more cores become increasingly dominant in modern computers.