It never rains but it pours. Today, I have not one, not two, but three new articles to announce. First off, OnJava.com has posted an interview Chris Adamson conducted with me over the last couple of weeks. The discussion covers network programming in Java, with a little XML thrown in on the side. The interview was occasioned by the recent publication of the third edition of Java Network Programming. OnJava has also excerpted parts of Chapter 7, URLs and URIs, Proxies and Passwords, on their web site. The complete version of Chapter 7 is now available in PDF format from O'Reilly's website. The complete book is online at Safari, but you have to pay for that. :-)
In an unrelated and long overdue matter, I have finally written the promised second part of Overloading Int Considered Harmful. This article explains how to make object serialization work with the type-safe enum design pattern and other variants of singleton.
It also addresses the issues that arise with these design patterns in multi-classloader environments. Finally, it explores the new enum keyword in Java 1.5, and demonstrates how Java can create multiple, non-equal instances of
what are allegedly unique, equal enum constants.