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I've been thinking a lot about the "it works on my machine" issue. We seem to build up and take care of our development environments or virtual machines (VMs). They have a state, mostly a non-deterministic state after being maintained for so long. The idea of spinning up an environment just to test some code would have been infeasible until recently. I do enjoy using VirtualBox , I've been using it for years. I didn't know that it could be used to automate the deployment of virtual machines. We have developers and devops in the office looking into Docker for this task, but I'm quite comfortable with virtualisation and I thought that I would see if I could use virtualbox (or KVM) for this. I discovered that Vagrant is a wonderful tool for this automated creation, provisioning and clean up of VMs for development and testing. I've only used Vagrant for 1 week, but I'm enjoying it so far. My PC at work is fairly old and slow, but even so, I can s...

With Oracle JDK 7, I see the usual VM options for 32 or 64-bit and -server to specify the server class JVM. With OpenJDK 7, I found it interesting to see quite a few more JVM options: Wikipedia: List of Java virtual machines Wikipedia: JamVM

Charles Oliver Nutter - Fast as C: How to write really terrible Java In this talk, we’ll explore the main reasons why Java code rarely runs as fast as C or C++ and how you can write really bad Java code that the JVM will do a better job of optimizing. We’ll take some popular microbenchmarks and burn them to the ground, monitoring JIT logs and assembly dumps along the way. vimeo Java talk video