There has been much discussion of proposed new features for Java in recent times, but what problems do those features need to address? What are your actual pain points today with Java?

In his RailConf keynote, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson explained his reasoning for preferring numeric entity IDs in URLs as opposed strings. What's your opinion?

Java's checked exceptions sometimes force you to catch a checked exception that you believe will never be thrown. Best practice dictates that you wrap that in an unchecked exception and rethrow it, just in case. What exception class do you wrap with in that case?

The recent proposal to add closures to Java brought up some questions for me. How much more productive would I be with closures in Java? How much more fun would I have?

Tonight we'll be upgrading the hardware that serves up Artima. In the future the site should scale better under heavy load, but tonight there will be some outage. We apologize in advance for the inconvenience.

In his weblog, Cameron Purdy suggests that when a distributed system is designed as a multi-cellular organism rather than a collection of individual cells, an application need not deal with the potential for other servers to fail, but rather with it's own potential for failure.

NetBeans has come a long way, and has a lot of features that can help you improve productivity, especially when you want to use Java standards. When do you use a standard, and when do you go it alone?

The traditional J2EE approach to authentication sessions is placing identity information in the servlets Session object. The memory used by the Sessions, and potential need to replicate them, places a drag on scalability. In this article, I propose a different approach that is more scalable because it requires less shared state.

When you design a system, you have to decide how many compromises to make in the name of future scalability. One scalability strategy is to partition data into multiple databases. When do you think the tradeoffs involved are worth the scalability gained?

In a recent developerWorks article, Andrew Glover suggests you continuously monitor code metrics to help you correct code quality problems, which could affect the long-term viability of your architecture. How useful have are code metrics in practice?

For languages and published APIs breaking compatibility has a cost, but so does creeping entropy.

In his weblog, Keith Braithwaite writes, "There is no mechanism available to the Smalltalk programmer to create programs other than the creation of EDSLs (Embedded Domain Specific Languages)," and suggests that is the source of Smalltalk's productivity.

HTTP Authentication may be RESTful, but it's not very USEful.

A software architecture should not only explain how things are done in a software project, it should guide the team in that direction.

There have been many calls for open sourcing Java, but that would mean letting go of the requirement for implementations to pass the compatibility test. How important is binary compatibility to you?