How do you now design a MapReduce algorithm that will give the desired answer? The key lies in finding a function that will produce the same key for all words that are anagrams. Applying this in the map phase will use the power of the MapReduce framework to deliver all words that are anagrams to the same reducer.

We had to draw the line for our analysis somewhere, so we took the first 700 responses and created the charts below. If there is a significant change in the number of responses, we'll update these charts with new results. We cover topics such as: which containers are most often used on large projects, to which container is the fastest, to redeploy times and annual costs of redeployment, then we provide the data for you to analyze yourself.

By the way, Firefox 3.5 allows you to make XMLHttpRequests cross domain (in other words code loaded from some domain foo.com can make XHR requests to domain bar.com). Mozilla's spec suggests a special HTTP header for that. And here is Java servlets filter from JSOS lets you add such a header to your site so cross domain requests could be allowed for existing web applications

A few weeks ago Michael Marth, who runs dev.day.com (Day’s developer portal), asked us if we could put together our impressions on the code quality of Apache Sling using Sonar. We thought it would be valuable to share the result of this exercise with the community.

I seem to be caught between two IDEs: Eclipse and IntelliJ. I abandoned Eclipse a couple of years back, partly based on wide spread recommendations from many different people, and partly because Eclipse just stopped working for me (it crashed out).

This past week Matt and I worked on several new tools to help manage the ever-increasing flood of spam that DZone attracts. I think we achieved a breakthrough on a key issue.

I’m pleased to announce that we at the Apache Maven project have released Maven 2.2.0. You should definitely give it a spin! Maven 2.1.0 was probably the most stable release we’ve ever done, in terms of the number of reported regressions. Maven 2.2.0 improves on this stability by fixing the few critical bugs that did come up, along with adding some new functionality.

Waldemar Kornewald and the rest of the Google App Engine Patch team have just released the first full text search implementation for Google App Engine (GAE).

The JavaOne presentations from years gone by are all available on-line in various forms. Yesterday I discovered that one of the best NetBeans Platform presentations ever done at JavaOne is one of these. It is presented by two engineers working at Boeing, about the platform and application they built atop the NetBeans Platform.

On a technical level this means Moblin is built for the Atom x86 chip found in many netbooks, while on a practical level it means Moblin is an Internet- and multimedia-focused operating system. Moblin is less about knocking-up spreadsheets on the move and more about twittering, updating your Facebook account, and watching movies on the go.

One annoying thing in Firefox 3.5 is the 'missing-close-button' on the single tab. By default. FF3.5 doesn't allow you to close a tab, when there is only one tab is there in the FF window. This article explains how to enable the close functionality even for the single tab also.

Here's some news for Grails users...

With support from the National Science Foundation, she and collaborators nationwide are using the power of storytelling to draw younger students into programming. An animation program called "Alice," invented by the late Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University, allows student programmers of all ages to create their own worlds without realizing they're actually writing code. Rodger recalled the rush of introducing fourth-to-sixth graders to Alice during an annual event that brings elementary school girls to the Duke campus to meet with female professors. "They learned Alice for half an hour, and then they got to create a world with it," Rodger said. "'Oh, wow, look!' they told each other. 'Come here. Show me. Look at this!' They were creating little stories with Alice, and in the process they were programming. They didn't know they were doing programming, but they were."

JDateTime is an elegant, developer-friendly and yet very precise way to track dates and time. It uses well-defined and proven astronomical algorithms for time manipulation. Everyone who has ever experienced frustration working with JDK Calendar will find this class a big relief.

Top 5 Static Analysis Plugins for Eclipse

The Open XML SDK provides a comprehensive set of classes that make generating and manipulating Microsoft Office documents much simpler and faster than was possible with older Office file formats.

It has been a while since I have written about Pivot, so I thought I would put together a quick entry to highlight a few of the things we have been working on recently.

You've probably been told over the years how great JVMs are. How well they've scaled, perform under a variety of different loads. How its doing its part to take advantage of the processing power of multi-core systems now that cranking the clock rate is almost wrung dry. The automatic memory management provided by the JVM's garbage collector is one of the most important aspects of scaling the JVM. There are many different kinds - as this great primer shows.

Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications.

Quick note on changing the memory settings for IntelliJ IDEA 9.

Trying to find the best layout or keywords we look at out competition, ask colleagues and friends for their opinion, spend countless hours building the perfect banner. But how do we know if it’s effective. With Google Website Optimizer we can not test different solutions and find out which one converts better!

SolarNetOne is novel initiative to span the divide. Learn how SolarNetOne can deploy a turnkey Internet hotspot—conditioned, renewable power; computers; WiFi; and an uplink—anywhere the sun shines with Linux and open source technologies.

Central Washington Universities tools for blind programmers.

Google has released Sputnik, a suite of 5000 tests that touch all aspects of the JavaScript language as defined in the ECMA-262 standard. It was created to check if V8, Google’s open source JavaScript engine conformed to the spec and to detect unexpected changes in behavior.

The NetBeans IDE 6.7 has been released at http://www.netbeans.org. News in this release are listed in NetBeans IDE 6.7 Release Information, release notes are available here.