Tomasz Nurkiewicz around Java and concurrency

foldLeft() method, available for all collections in Scala, allows to run a given 2-argument function against consecutive elements of that collection, where the result of that function is passed as the first argument in the next invocation. Second argument is always the current item in the collection. Doesn't sound very encouraging but as we will see soon there are great some use-cases waiting to be discovered.

Before we dive into foldLeft, let us have a look at reduce - simplified version of foldLeft. I always believed that a working code is worth a thousand words:
val input = List(3, 5, 7, 11) input.reduce((total, cur) => total + cur) or more readable:
def op(total: Int, cur: Int) = total + cur input reduce op The result is 26 (sum). The code is more-or-less readable: to reduce method we are passing 2-argument function op (operation). Both parameters of that function (and its return value) need to have the same type as the collection. reduce() will invoke that operation o…

Sometimes Quartz is not capable of running your job at the time when you desired. There are three reasons for that:
all worker threads were busy running other jobs (probably with higher priority)the scheduler itself was downthe job was scheduled with start time in the past (probably a coding error) You can increase the number of worker threads by simply customizing the org.quartz.threadPool.threadCount in quartz.properties (default is 10). But you cannot really do anything when the whole application/server/scheduler was down. The situation when Quartz was incapable of firing given trigger is called misfire. Do you know what Quartz is doing when it happens? Turns out there are various strategies (called misfire instructions) Quartz can take and also there are some defaults if you haven't thought about it. But in order to make your application robust and predictable (especially under heavy load or maintenance) you should really make sure your triggers and jobs are configured concious…

Today we will learn how Scala compiler implements very important aspect of the language known as an eta-expansion. We will see how scalac works around the limitations of JVM, in particular with the lack of higher-order functions. But before we begin, to a great surprise, we shall see how these limitations are bypassed by... the Java language itself!

Here is the easiest piece of code taking full advantage of anonymous inner classes in Java: the inner class calls method from an outer class. As you probably know every inner class has an implicit hidden Parent.this reference to an outer (parent) class. This is illustrated by the following example:
public class TestJ { public Runnable foo() { return new Runnable() { public void run() { inc(5); } }; } private int inc(int x) { return x + 1; } } Anonymous inner class calls private method of its parent completely transparently. Have you ever wondered how does an inner class get access to private meth…

Although briefly described in the official documentation, I believe Quartz plugins aren't known enough, looking at how useful they are.

Essentially plugins in Quartz are convenient classes wrapping registration of underlying listeners. You are free to write your own plugins but we will focus on existing ones shipped with Quartz.
LoggingTriggerHistoryPlugin First some background. Two main abstractions in Quartz are jobs and triggers. Job is a piece of code that we would like to schedule. Trigger instructs the scheduler when this code should run. CRON (e.g. run every Friday between 9 AM and 5 PM until November) and simple (run 100 times every 2 hours) triggers are most commonly used. You associate any number of triggers to a single job.

Believe it or not, Quartz by default provides no logging or monitoring whatsoever of executed jobs and triggers. There is an API, but no built-in logging is implemented. It won't show you that it now executes this particular job due to this tr…

I am starting a little series about Quartz scheduler internals, tips and tricks, this is a chapter 0 - how to configure persistent job store. In Quartz you essentially have a choice between storing jobs and triggers in memory and in a relation database ( Terracotta is a recent addition to the mix). I would say in 90% of the cases when you use RAMJobStore with Quartz you don't really need Quartz at all. Obviously this storage backend is transient and all your pending jobs and triggers are lost between restarts. If you are fine with that, much simpler and more lightweight solutions are available, including ScheduledExecutorService built into JDK and @Scheduled(cron="*/5 * * * * MON-FRI") in Spring. Can you justify using extra 0,5MiB JAR in this scenario?

This changes dramatically when you need clustering, fail-over, load-balancing and few other buzz-words. There are several use-cases for that:
single server cannot handle required number of concurrent, long running jobs an…