Effective Programming in Java

• Clarifying the goals of best practices
• Identifying the key characteristics of high-quality software

Optimising Software Development with Proven Techniques

Simplifying project build and deployment

• Automating the build process using Ant
• Controlling and configuring logging

Applying test-driven development

• Unit-testing complex components
• Composing and maintaining JUnit tests
• Automating project-wide testing
• Validating application results with functionality tests
• Testing container-managed components such as servlets

Improving Code Quality through Better Design

Expert recommendations

• Balancing extensibility and maintainability
• Avoiding problems with clone()
• Exception best practices

Attaining type safety

• Eliminating run-time errors with generics
• Writing generic classes and methods
• Limiting parameter values with canonicalisation

Enforcing encapsulation

• Providing coarse-grained methods with Memento
• Simplifying adaptation to interfaces

Refactoring and design patterns

• Streamlining source code by refactoring
• Designing to interfaces for improved software flexibility
• Key object-oriented design patterns
• Template Method
• Strategy
• Singleton
• Composite
• Factory
• Inversion of control

Tuning for Maximum Performance

Measuring performance

• Applying performance profiling tools
• Assessing response time
• Conducting load and stress tests
• Identifying performance bottlenecks

Strategies for improving performance

• Techniques for dealing with common Java performance issues
• Exploiting generational garbage collectors
• Choosing appropriate JVM and container settings
• Assessing the need for NIO and JNI
• Reordering loops to improve response time
• Processing streaming data to reduce memory overhead

Effective use of the Collections API

• Preventing memory leaks with weak references
• Selecting the best collection classes

Taking Full Advantage of Threads

Improving response time by parallelisation

• Writing reliable, thread-safe code
• Avoiding race hazards and deadlocks
• Employing the executors framework

Bulletproofing a threaded application

• Synchronising threads
• Techniques for sharing data between threads
• Managing the performance implications of synchronisation

Enforcing Security Constraints

Bulletproofing applications

• Secure coding in Java
• Restricting access to protected resources
• Establishing security policies

Authentication and authorisation

• Applying role-based security
• Authenticating users in Web applications

Managing Change with Design Patterns

Limiting the impact of changes

• Centralising properties using Singleton
• Inserting transparent behaviour with Proxy
• Wrapping external libraries using Adapter

Modern design patterns

• Inverting control (IoC) through bean factories
• Injecting behaviour with aspects
• Adding scripting abilities to an application
• Scripting end-user behaviour