Today I'm looking at Haskell type definition and the use of pattern-matching in functions. Pattern-matching is much more an integral feature of FP, as opposed to OO. But first...
I'm learning Haskell by following O'Sullivan, Goerzen and Stewart's Real World Haskell. I've been writing object-oriented code for well over half my career as a developer, and there are things about functional programming that really stand out to me specifically because of my OO background.
For the last year or so, I've been trying to come up to speed on functional programming, studying bits and pieces here and there. One interesting source was Bruce Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, which included a number of FP languages.
If you've looked at my recent posts, you know I'm working on a plugin for VisualVM, a very useful tool supplied with the JDK. In one example, I showed how to attach to a waiting Java application using a socket-based AttachingConnector.
Say you've got a good-sized chunk of code, in production, that doesn't always act as expected but it does so often enough that everyone's willing to keep using it (including your customers).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I noticed recently that the JDK utility VisualVM is extensible, and it was my goal to create a useful extension.
I'm not sure when this happened, but at some point the JDK-included VisualVM utility became extensible. This is really great news for me. Writing a profiler is a lot of work (although admittedly very interesting and fun).
We use DWR (http://www.directwebremoting.org) a lot where I'm working now. It's a Java library used to integrate JavaScript-based web development with Java middleware.
