Java

Zebra stripes are subtle alternating stripes painted behind list items in a graphical user interface (GUI). They improve the readability of wide and long lists, but the JList class in Java's Swing doesn't support them. This tip shows how to extend JList to add zebra background stripes.

Table zebra stripes are alternating subtle background stripes painted behind the table's rows in a graphical user interface (GUI). They improve the readability of long rows in wide tables, but the JTable class in Java's Swing doesn't support them. This tip shows how to extend JTable to add zebra background stripes.

Zebra stripes in a graphical user interface (GUI) are subtle background stripes painted behind the rows of a hierarchical list, or tree. They improve the readability of wide tree rows, but the JTree class in Java's Swing doesn't support them. This tip shows how to extend JTree to add zebra background stripes.

The starting point for building a link checker, web spider, or web page analyzer is, of course, to get the web page from the web server. Java's java.net package includes classes to manage URLs and to open web server connections. This tip shows how to use them to a get text, image, audio, or data file from a web server.

Performance optimization requires that you measure the time to perform a task, then try algorithm and coding changes to make the task faster. Prior to Java 5, the only way to time a task was to measure wall clock time. Unfortunately, this gives inaccurate results when there is other activity on the system (and there always is). Java 5 introduced the java.lang.management package and methods to report CPU and user time per thread. These times are not affected by other system activity, making them just what we need for benchmarking. This tip shows how to use them to benchmark your application.

Java's threads are essential for building complex applications, but thread control is split across several classes in different packages added at different times in the JDK's history. This tip shows how to connect these classes together to find threads and thread groups, and get thread information.

Java has several classes for reading files, with and without buffering, random access, thread safety, and memory mapping. Some of these are much faster than the others. This tip benchmarks 13 ways to read bytes from a file and shows which ways are the fastest.