Integer vs floating point arithmetic - Java Coding Question

I am starting a new series called Java Coding Quiz, in which I'll show you subtle Java concepts hidden in the code. This is an OCAJP or OCPJP style question but focused on teaching subtle details of Java programming language. In today's puzzle, you will learn about one of the key concepts about how floating point and integer arithmetic works in Java. This is a very important concept for any Java developer because Java behaves differently when the same operation is performed by different types of variable but of the same value.

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How to check if ResultSet is empty in JDBC - Java Example

The JDBC ResultSet doesn't provide any isEmpty(), length() or size() method to check if its empty or not. Hence, when a Java programmer needs to determine if ResultSet is empty or not, it just calls the next() method and if next() return false it means ResultSet is empty. This is correct but the main problem with this approach is if the ResultSet is not empty then you may miss the first row if you follow the standard idiom to iterate over ResultSet and get the rows which involve calling next() method of ResultSet in a while loop. The key thing, which you need to remember is that initially the ResultSet's cursor points to before the first row when you call the next() method it points to the first row and if you don't get this data and calls the next() method again then you will lose the first row.

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Top 21 Java Final Modifier (Keyword) Interview Questions and Answers

The final modifier is one of the important keywords in Java. You can use this with a class, method, and variable as well. A good knowledge of final keyword is not only essential for writing good, performant and secure Java programs but also to clear any  Java interview. Interviewer pays special attention to final keyword and expects candidates knows how and when to use the final modifier with variables, methods, and classes. In this article, I have collected Java interview questions which are based upon the concept of final modifier. You might have seen many of these questions on both telephonic and face-to-face round. You can use this collection not only to check your knowledge about final keyword but also to prepare for final modifier from Java interview's perspective.  If you have come across any interesting final modifier question which is not in this list, please share with us as a comment and I'll add into this list.

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Why Timestamp cannot be used in place of Date in Java?

One of the tricky question from Java Interview is, "Can we pass a Timestamp instance to a method expecting java.util.Date?", it's a tricky question because the answer is both Yes and No. You can, of course, pass a Timestamp object to a method with the argument as Date because first, Timestamp is a subclass of java.util.Date and second it contains both date and time values which are missing in either java.sql.Date and java.sql.Time. So there is more reason to pass a Timestamp value to Date but you should not be doing that. Why? because Timestamp is not exactly Date. It's a composite type of java.util.Date and an additional nanosecond value which is fitted there to confirm database DATETIME data type, which supports nanosecond precision. If you look at the implementation of java.sql.Timestamp class, you will find that the long value supplied by Date is stored separately then this nanosecond value.

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Java Object Oriented Analysis and Design Problem - Vending Machine Part 2

This is the second part of Java tutorial to show how to create Vending Machine in Java. In the first part, we have discussed problem statement and the solution itself, but unit testing and design document was still pending, which we'll see in this article.  As I said, there are multiple ways to implement Vending machine in Java e.g. you could have easily used state design pattern to implement a vending machine, in fact, it's one of the best examples of State design pattern. Vending machine behaves differently on different states e.g. return a product if the machine is not empty, otherwise, it just returns coins, so it ideally fits in state design pattern. Though, In our solution, I have not used the state design pattern but have just coded the solution with an if else block. This is easier because of a limited number of state and not many state transition but in more real world scenario, state design pattern is better as it uses Polymorphism and removes the logic we have put inside the if-else block.

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Design a Vending Machine in Java - Interview Question

How do you design a Vending Machine in Java? is one of the good Java interview questions mostly asked at Senior level Java developer Interviews. In a typical coding interview, you will be given a problem statement to develop a vending machine and within a limited time, usually, 2 to 3 hours you need to produce design document, working code and unit test in Java. One of the key advantages of such Java interviews is that you can test many essential skills or a candidate in one go. In order to complete  the design, coding, and unit testing of  a Vending machine, a candidate needs to be really good in all three departments. By the way, this kind of real world problem is also a good exercise to improve your object-oriented analysis and design skills (see here), which is very important if you want to become a good application developer.

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What is difference between Synchronized and Concurrent Collections in Java?

Synchronized vs Concurrent Collections
Though both Synchronized and Concurrent Collection classes provide thread-safety, the differences between them comes  in performance, scalability and how they achieve thread-safety. Synchronized collections like synchronized HashMap, Hashtable, HashSet, Vector, and synchronized ArrayList are much slower than their concurrent counterparts e.g. ConcurrentHashMap, CopyOnWriteArrayList, and CopyOnWriteHashSet. Main reason for this slowness is locking; synchronized collections locks the whole collection e.g. whole Map or List while concurrent collection never locks the whole Map or List. They achieve thread safety by using advanced and sophisticated techniques like lock stripping. For example, the ConcurrentHashMap divides the whole map into several segments and locks only the relevant segments, which allows multiple threads to access other segments of same ConcurrentHashMap without locking.

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Difference between notify and notifyAll in Java - When and How to use

notify vs notifyAll in Java

What is the difference between notify and notifyAll method is one of the tricky Java questions, which is easy to answer but once Interviewer asks follow-up questions, you either got confused or not able to provide clear-cut and to the point answers? The main difference between notify and notifyAll is that notify method will only notify one Thread and notifyAll method will notify all Threads  which are waiting on that monitor or lock. By the way, this is something you have been reading in all over places and to be frank,  this statement despite being correct is not complete and its very difficult to understand difference between notify vs notifyAll by just reading this statement. Lot of questions comes in mind like

Which thread will be notified if I use notify()?

How do I know how many threads are waiting, so that I can use notifyAll() ?

How to call notify()?

What are these thread waiting for being notified etc?

Actually, discussion of notify and notifyAll is incomplete without discussing wait method in Java and I had touched based on this on my earlier article why to wait and notify must be called from synchronized context. In for order to get answer to those questions and understand difference between notify and notifyAll we will use a simple Java Thread example using wait and notify code :

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Difference between ExecutorService.submit() and Executor.execute() methods in Java?

What is the difference between Executor.submit() and Executor.execute() method in Java? is one of the good multi-threading questions for experienced Java programmers, mostly asked in Investment Banks like Barclays, Deutsche Bank, or Citibank. A main difference between the submit() and execute() method is that ExecuterService.submit()can return result of computation because it has a return type of Future, but execute() method cannot return anything because it's return type is void. The core interface in Java 1.5's Executor framework is the Executor interface which defines the execute(Runnable task) method, whose primary purpose is to separate the task from its execution.

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Top 10 Servlet Interview Question Answers - J2EE

This time its servlet interview questions, I was thinking what to pick for my interview series and then I thought about J2EE and Servlet is my favorite on that space. Servlet is an important part of any J2EE development and serves as Controller on many web MVC frameworks and that’s why it’s quite popular on J2EE interviews. These Servlet questions are based on my experience as well as collected by friends and colleague and they are not only good for interview practice but also shows a new direction of learning for anyone who is not very familiar with servlet technology.

As said earlier this interview question article is part of my earlier series java interview questions , UNIX command interview questions and Java threading interview questions.

You can find answers to all these questions on google but I have also listed my answers for quick reference.

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Difference between Stack and Heap memory in Java

The difference between stack and heap memory is common programming question asked by beginners learning Java or any other programming language. Stack and heap memory are two terms programmers starts hearing once they started programming but without any clear and definite explanation. Lack of knowledge of what is a heap in Java and what is stack memory in Java results in misconceptions related to stack and heap. To add to this confusion, a stack is also a data structure which is used to store elements in LIFO(Last In First out) order and available in Java API as java.util.Stack. In general, both stack and heap are part of memory, a program is allocated and used for different purposes. Java program runs on JVM which is launched as a process by "java" command. Java also uses both stack and heap memory for different needs. In our last article 10 points on Java heap space, I have touched base on Java heap space and in this article we will see the difference between stack and heap memory in Java.

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Top 50 Java Thread Interview Questions Answers for Experienced

You go to any Java interview, senior or junior, experience or freshers,  you are bound to see a couple of questions from the thread, concurrency, and multi-threading. In fact, this built-in concurrency support is one of the strongest points of Java programming language and helped it to gain popularity among enterprise world and programmers equally. Most of lucrative Java developer position demands excellent core Java multi-threading skills and experience in developing, debugging and tuning high-performance low latency concurrent Java applications. This is the reason, it is one of the most sought after skill on Java interviews. The multithreading and concurrency are also hard to master concept and only good developers with solid experience can effectively deal with concurrency issues.

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Data Access Object (DAO) design pattern in Java - Tutorial Example

Data Access Object or DAO design pattern is a popular design pattern to implement persistence layer of Java application. DAO pattern is based on abstraction and encapsulation design principles and shields rest of application from any change in the persistence layer e.g. change of database from Oracle to MySQL, change of persistence technology e.g. from File System to Database. For example, if you are authenticating the user using a relational database and later your company wants to use LDAP to perform authentication. If you are using DAO design pattern to access database, it would be relatively safe as you only need to make a change on Data Access Layer. DAO design pattern also keeps coupling low between different parts of an application. By using DAO design pattern your View Layer is completely independent of DAO layer and only Service layer has the dependency on it which is also abstracted by using DAO interface.

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9 difference between Array vs ArrayList in Java

Both array and ArrayList are two important data structure in Java and frequently used in Java programs. Even though ArrayList is internally backed by an array, knowing the difference between an array and an ArrayList in Java is critical for becoming a good Java developer. If you know the similarity and differences, you can judiciously decide when to use an array over an AraryList or vice-versa. In this article, I'll help you understand the difference between ArrayList and array in Java. If you are coming from C or C++ background then you already know that array is one of the most useful data structure in the programming world. It offers O(1) performance for index-based search and one of the fundamental way to store data.

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How does Java HashMap or LinkedHahsMap handles collisions?

Prior to Java 8, HashMap and all other hash table based Map implementation classes in Java handle collision by chaining, i.e. they use linked list to store map entries which ended in the same bucket due to a collision. If a key end up in same bucket location where an entry is already stored then this entry is just added at the head of the linked list there. In the worst case this degrades the performance of the get() method of HashMap to O(n) from O(1). In order to address this issue in the case of frequent HashMap collisions, Java8 has started using a balanced tree instead of linked list for storing collided entries. This also means that in the worst case you will get a performance boost from O(n) to O(log n).

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