Glen Vanderburg gave an exhaustive presentation on the Java Collections Framework. Despite the mundane subject matter, this was a session worth attending. Although most of the tips and tricks were old hat to experienced developers, I’m certain everyone learned something new.
My favorite tidbits:
- Collections.binarySearch(…)
- Glenn’s ugly trick of using try…finally to execute code after a return
- Glenn’s DemandMap, a Map decorator that uses a provided Factory to create missing values
- Overriding removeEldestEntry(…) to expire items in an LRU cache.
Glenn also highly recommended Effective Java.