Can't extend ByteBuffer

java.nio.ByteBuffer is not extensible and this really sucks badly. I didn't realize that till today when I thought to write a custom ByteBuffer implementation and then realized that all the constructors had only package visibility.

The thing is that there are many good reasons why you would want a custom implementation of ByteBuffer . Maybe you want to proxy over another ByteBuffer for example; have an optimized view over a larger ByteBuffer to reduce data copying.

It seems that I was not the only one to feel this way. Check out http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=693259&messageID=4028590

It appears that not just a few people, but also whole frameworks like Apache MINA have gone ahead and constructed their own ByteBuffer replacements. Check out http://mina.apache.org/report/1.1/apidocs/org/apache/mina/common/ByteBuffer.html which is extensible.

Google Collections now in Maven repository

(This blog has been dead for like forever - so many draft entries that were never turned to posts over the last year, but *shrug*)

Google Collections has now been mavenized, or to be more precise - the artifacts are present in the maven repository. Check out Maven Repo1 and the issue that reports this.

Just add the below to your <project>.pom and you are good to go.

<dependency>
           <groupId>com.google.code.google-collections</groupId>
           <artifactId>google-collect</artifactId>
           <version>snapshot-20080321</version>
</dependency>

(Google collection's is like the Apache commons collections but generified)