Boost Your Java Skills: Must-Know Code Hacks

Java is one of the most versatile programming languages, and mastering its essential code techniques can significantly streamline your development process.

Java

Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, having a cheat sheet with key Java snippets at your fingertips can boost efficiency and help tackle complex challenges faster.

Below, we break down some must-know code categories that every developer should keep in their toolkit.

1. Mastering Loops for Iteration

Loops are essential for efficiently processing data in Java. Let’s start with the for loop, which allows iteration over a range of values.

// Simple iteration from 0 to 9
for (int index = 0; index < 10; index++) {
    System.out.print(index);
}
// Output: 0123456789

In cases where you need to manipulate multiple variables within a loop, you can do something like this:

// Iteration with two variables in the loop
for (int i = 0, j = 0; i < 3; i++, j--) {
    System.out.print(j + "|" + i + " ");
}
// Output: 0|0 -1|1 -2|2

This combination of variables and conditions inside a loop can help optimize complex logic in a more readable and concise manner.

2. Working with Lists for Flexible Data Storage

Lists are a common data structure in Java, allowing you to store and retrieve elements dynamically. Here’s how you can use ArrayList:

// Initialize a list of integers
List<Integer> numbers = new ArrayList<>();

// Adding elements to the list
numbers.add(2);
numbers.add(5);
numbers.add(8);

// Accessing the first element
System.out.println(numbers.get(0)); // Output: 2

// Iterating through the list using an index
for (int i = 0; i < numbers.size(); i++) {
    System.out.println(numbers.get(i));
}

// Removing elements from the list
numbers.remove(numbers.size() - 1); // Removes the last element
numbers.remove(0); // Removes the first element

// Iterating through the modified list
for (Integer num : numbers) {
    System.out.println(num); // Output: 5
}

This example illustrates how to add, access, and remove elements from an ArrayList.

3. Using Deques for Flexible Data Handling

Java’s Deque (Double-Ended Queue) provides flexible data manipulation. Here’s an adapted example:

// Create a deque for strings
Deque<String> animals = new ArrayDeque<>();

// Add elements to the deque
animals.add("Dog");
animals.addFirst("Cat");
animals.addLast("Horse");

// Display the contents of the deque
System.out.println(animals); // Output: [Cat, Dog, Horse]

// Peek at the first element without removal
System.out.println(animals.peek()); // Output: Cat

// Remove and return the first element
System.out.println(animals.pop()); // Output: Cat

This example demonstrates how to manipulate elements at both ends of the Deque.

4. Mathematical Operations with the Math Class

Java’s Math class offers a range of mathematical functions. Here’s a rephrased set of examples:

// Find the maximum and minimum of two numbers
System.out.println(Math.max(8, 15));   // Output: 15
System.out.println(Math.min(8, 15));   // Output: 8

// Calculate the absolute value and square root
System.out.println(Math.abs(-7));      // Output: 7
System.out.println(Math.sqrt(25));     // Output: 5.0

// Calculate power and round to the nearest integer
System.out.println(Math.pow(3, 4));    // Output: 81.0
System.out.println(Math.round(5.7));   // Output: 6

// Perform trigonometric functions using radians
System.out.println(Math.sin(Math.toRadians(45)));  // Output: 0.707
System.out.println(Math.cos(Math.toRadians(45)));  // Output: 0.707

These examples highlight how to perform various mathematical operations and conversions with Java’s Math class.

Conclusions

Mastering essential Java code techniques is crucial for elevating your development skills and improving code efficiency. By delving into various coding practices, you can refine your programming abilities and produce more robust applications. Here’s a breakdown of key areas where Java techniques can make a significant impact:

  1. Handling Loops and Iterations:
    • Efficient loop handling is fundamental for processing data and automating repetitive tasks. By understanding different types of loops, such as for, while, and do-while, you can optimize your code for performance and readability.
    • Example: Utilize the for loop to iterate through a range of values or a collection, ensuring minimal computational overhead.
  2. Managing Collections:
    • Java Collections Framework provides versatile data structures like ArrayList, HashMap, and Deque for managing groups of objects. Mastering these collections allows you to efficiently store, retrieve, and manipulate data.
    • Example: Use ArrayList for dynamic arrays where elements can be added or removed, and HashMap for key-value pairs to quickly access data based on a unique key.
  3. Performing Complex Mathematical Calculations:
    • Java offers a suite of mathematical functions and constants via the Math class, such as Math.max(), Math.sqrt(), and Math.pow(). Leveraging these functions helps in performing accurate and efficient calculations.
    • Example: Calculate the square root of a number using Math.sqrt() or find the power of a number using Math.pow() for precise mathematical operations.
  4. Optimizing Code with Advanced Techniques:
    • Advanced techniques like multi-threading, generics, and exception handling play a critical role in writing efficient and error-free code. By understanding and implementing these techniques, you can handle complex scenarios and improve application performance.
    • Example: Use multi-threading to perform parallel tasks, generics for type-safe collections, and exception handling to manage errors gracefully.
  5. Applying Best Practices for Cleaner Code:
    • Adhering to best practices like SOLID principles, clean code guidelines, and proper logging ensures that your code is maintainable, scalable, and easy to understand.
    • Example: Follow SOLID principles to design robust and flexible object-oriented systems, and use logging libraries to track application behavior and troubleshoot issues.

These Java code techniques will not only enhance your development skills but also make you a more effective and confident Java developer. By applying these practices, you can streamline your coding process, tackle various programming challenges with ease, and contribute to the creation of high-quality software solutions. Keep these techniques in mind as you continue to grow and excel in your Java programming journey.

Let us develop your Java application!

Let us know at [email protected]

Mastering Java: Essential Code Techniques for Modern Development

Java

Java Roadmap

Mastering Java requires a step-by-step approach, moving from the basics to advanced topics. Here’s a streamlined roadmap to guide your journey:

1. Setup and Tools

  • Linux: Learn basic commands.
  • Git: Master version control for collaboration.
  • IDEs: Familiarize yourself with:
    • IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, or VSCode.

2. Core Java Concepts

  • OOP: Understand classes, objects, inheritance, and polymorphism.
  • Arrays & Strings: Work with data structures and string manipulation.
  • Loops: Control flow with for, while, and do-while.
  • Interfaces & Packages: Organize and structure code.

3. File I/O and Collections

  • File Handling: Learn file operations using I/O Streams.
  • Collections Framework: Work with Lists, Maps, Stacks, and Queues.
  • Optionals: Avoid null pointer exceptions with Optional.

4. Advanced Java Concepts

  • Dependency Injection: Understand DI patterns.
  • Design Patterns: Learn common patterns like Singleton and Factory.
  • JVM Internals: Learn memory management and garbage collection.
  • Multi-Threading: Handle concurrency and threads.
  • Generics & Exception Handling: Write type-safe code and handle errors gracefully.
  • Streams: Work with functional programming using Streams.

5. Testing and Debugging

  • Unit & Integration Testing: Use JUnit/TestNG for testing.
  • Debugging: Learn debugging techniques.
  • Mocking: Use libraries like Mockito for test isolation.

6. Databases

  • Database Design: Learn to design schemas and write efficient queries.
  • SQL & NoSQL: Work with relational (JDBC) and non-relational databases.
  • Schema Migration Tools: Use Flyway or Liquibase for migrations.
Java

7. Clean Code Practices

  • SOLID Principles: Write maintainable and scalable code.
  • Immutability: Ensure thread-safe and predictable objects.
  • Logging: Implement effective logging for debugging.

8. Build Tools

  • Learn to use Maven, Gradle, or Bazel for project builds.

9. HTTP and APIs

  • HTTP Protocol & REST API: Design scalable APIs.
  • GraphQL: Explore efficient querying with GraphQL.

10. Frameworks

  • Spring Boot: Build production-ready applications.
  • Play & Quarkus: Learn lightweight, cloud-native frameworks.

Let us develop your Java application!

Let us know at [email protected]

How to write trained Word2Vec model to CSV with DeepLearning4j

I used DeepLearning4j to train word2vec model. Then I had to save the dictionary to CSV so I can run some clustering algorithms on it.

Sounded like a simple task, but it took a while, and here is the code to do this:

 

   private void writeIndexToCsv(String csvFileName, Word2Vec model) {

        CSVWriter writer = null;
        try {
            writer = new CSVWriter(new FileWriter(csvFileName));
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        VocabCache&lt;VocabWord&gt; vocCache =  model.vocab();
        Collection&lt;VocabWord&gt; wrds = vocCache.vocabWords();

        for(VocabWord w : wrds) {
            String s = w.getWord();
            System.out.println(&quot;Looking into the word:&quot;);
            System.out.println(s);
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.append(s).append(&quot;,&quot;);
            double[] wordVector = model.getWordVector(s);
            for(int i = 0; i &lt; wordVector.length; i++) {
                sb.append(wordVector[i]).append(&quot;,&quot;);
            }

            writer.writeNext(sb.toString().split(&quot;,&quot;), false);
        }

        try {
            writer.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

5 programming languages to fall in love with on St. Valentine’s Day.

Saint Valentine’s Day is a holiday of love not only toward your beloved one or family, but also to things like… programming languages. We would like to outline 5 programming languages to fall in love with on St.  Valentine’s Day.

Python

The list of reasons to love Python is infinite:

  • Prevents you from writing Spaghetti code by not compiling without proper indents.
  • Very easy to get started.
  • Multiple tutorials and mobile apps to learn Python on the run.
  • Great web frameworks like Django.
  • List of powerful packages. Just anything from csv to machine learning packages.
  • Easy to install, don’t need IDE.

Scala

Scala is not new and is growing and deemed as a future replacement to Java

  • Unlike Java has a lightweight syntax
  • Is 100% JVM compatible, so you can reuse existing modules.
  • Has great web framework called Play.
  • Implements functional programming paradigm.
  • Syntaxis sugar.

Angular 2

  • Best JS framework, great support, huge community
  • A lot of technologies relying on it. (i.e. Ionic 2).
  • Great data binding.
  • Improved version of Angular 1, with a better approach (not backward compatible).

C#

Old but good language that still dominates the charts.

  • Extremely popular with tons of examples and huge community.
  • Soon to be 100% cross-platform via .NET Core.
  • Excellent business-oriented web framework ASP.NET.
  • Great ORM frameworks, test frameworks.
  • Quite backward compatible, you will not drown with legacy code.

Kotlin

  • Very fresh and lightweight.
  • 100% JVM compatible
  • Out of box in IntelliJ IDEA because…
  • Kotlin created by developers at JetBrains and that these folks know to how to master a language. Just imagine, for so many years they studied thoroughly languages like Java, Groovy, Scala, and they surely have tons of “inspiration” to come up with a good programming language.

Let us program for you in any of this language, let us know at [email protected]

Happy St. Valentine’s Day!

 

Update XML node in Python

I like python because it’s minimalistic and elegant.
Let’s see how to update an XML node using ElementTree.

We use CD catalog in XML as a datasource.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="cdcatalog.xsl"?>
 <catalog>
<cd>
  <title>empire burlesque</title> 
  <artist>bob dylan</artist> 
  <country>usa</country> 
  <company>columbia</company> 
  <price>10.90</price> 
  <year>1985</year> 
  </cd>
 <cd>
  <title>hide your heart</title> 
  <artist>bonnie tyler</artist> 
  <country>uk</country> 
  <company>cbs records</company> 
  <price>9.90</price> 
  <year>1988</year> 
  </cd>
 <cd>
  <title>greatest hits</title> 
  <artist>dolly parton</artist> 
  <country>usa</country> 
  <company>rca</company> 
  <price>9.90</price> 
  <year>1982</year> 
  </cd>
</catalog>

Here is the python script itself.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET	

#parse XML file
tree = ET.parse('catalog_.xml')

#get root
root = tree.getroot()
#iterate over each price node (which is subchild of cd node)
for price in root.iter('price'):
	#get the price of CD, multiply 10
	new_price = float(price.text) * 10
	#update the text (value) of the node
	price.text = str(new_price)
	#add 'updated' attribute to mark node updated=yes
	price.set('updated', 'yes')

#can also use the same file if you want to directly update file.
tree.write('catalog_new.xml')

And the output is the following:

<catalog>
<cd>
  <title>empire burlesque</title> 
  <artist>bob dylan</artist> 
  <country>usa</country> 
  <company>columbia</company> 
  <price updated="yes">109.0</price> 
  <year>1985</year> 
  </cd>
 <cd>
  <title>hide your heart</title> 
  <artist>bonnie tyler</artist> 
  <country>uk</country> 
  <company>cbs records</company> 
  <price updated="yes">99.0</price> 
  <year>1988</year> 
  </cd>
 <cd>
  <title>greatest hits</title> 
  <artist>dolly parton</artist> 
  <country>usa</country> 
  <company>rca</company> 
  <price updated="yes">99.0</price> 
  <year>1982</year> 
  </cd>
</catalog>

Remove duplicate lines from a file in Scala

How to remove duplicate lines from csv or txt file?

The answer is quite straightforward: you basically need BufferedReader and BufferedWriter, and this also works for large files quite well.

 

 def removeDuplicatesFromFile(fileName : String) {

    val reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName))
    val lines = new mutable.HashSet[String]()
    var line: String = null
    while ({line = reader.readLine; line != null}) {
      lines.add(line)
    }
    reader.close

    val writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(fileName))
    for (unique <- lines) {
      writer.write(unique)
      writer.newLine()
    }
    writer.close

  }

Top 5 useful Java Libs

Java is an advanced language, but nonetheless there are libs to make life even more easier. We would like to share 5 useful libs to help you with projects of different kind.

FileUtils – Apache Commons

Small but a very useful lib to help you deal with files. Simplifies working with files in a great way, making you productive and avoiding boilerplate code.

FileUtils.readLines(new File("myfile.txt"));

String Utils – Apache Commons

Also small but powerful library. Has all string methods you always lack.

String title = StringUtils.substringBetween(someText, "The", "end");

Jsoup Library

This is the best Java library for parsing HTML and XML, or other markup in general.

Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://example.com/").get();
String title = doc.title();

OpenCSV

Parsing CSV is a trivial task, but sometimes still cause trouble. OpenCSV is a minimalistic library to help you with this.

CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new FileReader("yourfile.csv"));
     String [] nextLine;
     while ((nextLine = reader.readNext()) != null) {
        // nextLine[] is an array of values from the line
        System.out.println(nextLine[0] + nextLine[1] + "etc...");
     }

org.json

You usually do a lot of networking in Java, but what you really need is a good JSON parser/manager. Org.json is a popular and minimalistic Java library for operating with JSON data.

String str = "{ \"firstName\": \"Vladimir\", \"age\": 30 }";
JSONObject obj = new JSONObject(str);
String n = obj.getString("firstName");
int a = obj.getInt("age");
System.out.println(n + " " + a);  // prints "Vladimir 30"

We would also point out other libs like fasterxml, FileNameUtils and Unirest.

Hope you’ll find these minimalistic java libs helpful and powerful.

Anyway you can check with us to see if we can help you develop your java application.