At last year's JavaOne conference, I attended a session in which the speaker talked about Sun's plan for the Java virtual machine (JVM). In this talk, the speaker stated that Sun planned, among other things, to clear up current performance bottlenecks in its virtual machine, such as the slowness of synchronized methods and the performance costs of garbage collection. The speaker stated Sun's goal: With the improvements to the JVM, programmers would not need to think about avoiding virtual machine bottlenecks when they designed their programs; they would only need to think of creating "good object-oriented, thread-safe designs."
The speaker did not, however, elaborate on what actually constitutes a good object-oriented, thread-safe design. That is the aim of this new column. Through the articles of the Design Techniques column, I hope to answer the question: What is a good Java program design, and how do you create one?
