Introduction to JEPs - The Java Enhancement Proposal Process

The JDK advances through JEPs. A JEP, or Java Enhancement Proposal, starts off as a Draft, and eventually into Submitted state for wider review. It gets promoted to Candidate phase if it is accepted for inclusion in the Roadmap by the OpenJDK lead. Even if in Candidate phase, it must move to Funded phase before it can reach the Completed state. JEP2 contains the text format in which a JEP must be written.

What are Variable Handles (VarHandles) in Java?

VarHandles are explained in JEP193. The author is Doug Lea.

8u45 and the JRE expiration date

The JRE expires when a new security update becomes available. 8u45 will expire on July 14, 2015. 8u45 contains a new blacklist JAR entry.

IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 14.1.3

The installer takes up about 195MB of disk space and then expands into around 550 MB. The UI theme can be set to IntelliJ (default) or Darcula (black background, with orange keywords e.g. import, new etc,). The next phase of the installer is Default Plugins (Java Frameworks such as JBoss Seam, Struts, Spring, J2EE), and Build Tools (ant, maven, gradle) and Web Development (HTML, JavaScript). There is also IdeaVIM, a VIM plugin which is not recommended - even if you are familiar with VIM. A Scala plugin is also an optional extra.

More Respect for Object-Relational Mapping in Java through JPA

As mentioned before, JPA is important. What JPA is can be understood here.

Groovy in Action

Learning how to script in Groovy can be daunting without some extra help.

Here are some learning tips and resources.

BOOKS

"Groovy in Action" by technology publishers Manning Publications (2007) is a great introduction which doubles up as a helpful code mentor which will get you Groovy-ing in no time - without having to traipse the Interweb for code samples!

TOOLS

groovysh - is the groovy shell..  When you are done, type :x to exit the shell
groovyConsole - loads and runs groovy files

RxJava - Reactive Extensions for Java

The library for asynchronous, stream-based programming has come to Java. Sample it on GitHub. Here's the same project for Scala.