Introduction Using phantom types is a very simple technique that can be used to increase the compile-time safety of code. There are a lot of potential use cases with different levels of complexity, but even a very lightweight usage of phantom types can significantly increase the compile-time safety. A phantom type is simply a parameterized type with an unused type ...

Introduction In part 1 I showed how server push and threads can be used to execute background tasks in a ZK application. However, the simple example had a major flaw that makes it a bad approach for real-world applications: it starts a new thread for each background task. JDK5 introduced the ExecutorService class, which abstracts away the threading details, and ...

Asynchronous UI updates are very useful, because they typically improve the responsiveness, usability and the general feel of user interfaces. I’ll be focusing here on the ZK framework, but generally the same principles apply for desktop UIs too (Swing, SWT). Long-running processing Sometimes you might have a database query, or an external web service call that takes a long time. ...

Spring objects are recognized based on their names It doesn’t matter whether you use XML or Java config, a Spring scope is roughly like a Map<String, Object> structure. This means that you cannot have two objects with the same name. Why is this a bad thing? If you have a large application with lots of @Configuration classes or XML files, ...

This is not a “pitfall” per se, but an implementation detail worth knowing. Let’s say I have a inner class with a field. Such a field is visible to the enclosing class, but which one of the following ways is the fastest way to access it? Note! I’m only looking here at the generated bytecode, and not considering any JIT ...

I’ve been asked several times to present some of my opinions about ZK. So, based of my experience of 4 years as a ZK user, here’s some thoughts: Overall developer experience, the community and documentation “It just works” Most of the stuff that ZK offers works very well, and the functionality is usually very intuitive to use if you have ...