Difference in String pool between Java 6 and 7

String pool in Java is a pool of String literals and interned Strings in JVM for efficient use of String object. Since String is immutable in Java, it makes sense to cache and shares them in JVM. The String pool has gone through an important change in Java 7 release when it was relocated from PermGen space to heap space. Till Java 1.6, interned String and literals are stored in the PermGen space of JVM memory, which was a fixed size area for storing class metadata. The biggest issue of having String pool in PermGen is the small and fixed size of PermGen space. In some JVM it ranges from 32M to 96M, which is quite small for a large program. Since String is extensively used in both small and large Java application, Java designers thought String pool is the best way optimize the use of String object in Java.

Read more »

Binary Tree PreOrder Traversal in Java - Recursion and Iteration Example

Unlike linked list and array which can only be traversed linearly, there are several ways to traverse a binary tree. The tree traversal algorithms are mainly divided into two parts, depth first and breadth first. As their name suggests, in depth first, the tree is traversed downwards (towards the depth) before the next sibling is visited, the PreOrder, InOrder and PostOrder traversal of a binary tree are actually depth-first traversals. On the breadth first, the entire breadth of the tree is traversed before moving to next level, hence it is also known as level order traversal. There are other algorithms to traverse a binary tree as well e.g. Monte Carlo tree search, which concentrates on analyzing the most promising moves, but the pre-order, post-order, and in-order traversal are the most popular ways to traverse a binary tree in Java. They are also the most popular data structure and algorithm questions at beginner and intermediate level.

Read more »

Eclipse - How to add/remove external JAR into Java Project's Classpath

There are multiple ways you can add an external JAR into the classpath of a Java project in Eclipse, but all goes via adding them into build path. Many beginner's struggles to add JARs into classpath and we will try to address that problem in this tutorial. You will learn step by step tutorial to add an internal or third party JAR in your application's CLASSPATH in Eclipse Indigo. Since this feature has hardly changed in any Eclipse version, you can follow same steps in Eclipse Kepler, Indigo, and Juno version to add JARs into classpath. Since Eclipse is the most popular Java IDE and used by many companies, it's important for a Java developer to know Eclipse in and out. It will not only help to work better but also to create the better impression among your teammates.

Read more »

How to remove duplicate rows from a table in SQL

There are a couple of ways to remove duplicate rows from a table in SQL e.g. you can use a temp tables or a window function like row_number() to generate artificial ranking and remove the duplicates. By using a temp table, you can first copy all unique records into a temp table and then delete all data from the original table and then copy unique records again to the original table. This way, all duplicate rows will be removed, but with large tables, this solution will require additional space of the same magnitude of the original table. The second approach doesn't require extra space as it removes duplicate rows directly from the table. It uses a ranking function like row_number() to assign a row number to each row.

Read more »

10 Examples to read a text file in Java

The Java IO API provides two kinds of interfaces for reading files, streams and readers. The streams are used to read binary data and readers to read character data. Since a text file is full of characters, you should be using a Reader implementations to read it. There are several ways to read a plain text file in Java e.g. you can use FileReader, BufferedReader or Scanner to read a text file. Every utility provides something special e.g. BufferedReader provides buffering of data for fast reading, and Scanner provides parsing ability. You can also use both BufferedReader and Scanner to read a text file line by line in Java. Then Java SE 8 introduces another Stream class java.util.stream.Stream which provides a lazy and more efficient way to read a file.

Read more »

Printing Largest and Smallest of N numbers without using Array in Java

One of the common programming questions is, how do you find the largest and smallest number in N numbers without using arrays in Java? Can you write a program to solve this problem? Well, it's very similar to the problem we have seen before, find the largest and smallest of 3 integers. You can use the same approach and generalize it for N numbers. All you need to do is start with largest as Integer.MIN_VALUE and smallest number as Integer.MAX_VALUE and loop through N numbers. At each iteration, compare the number with the largest and smallest number, if the current number is larger than largest than its a new largest and if the current number is smaller than smallest than its a new smallest number.

Read more »

How to take array input in Java using Scanner - Example

There is no direct way to take array input in Java using Scanner or any other utility, but it's pretty easy to achieve the same by using standard Scanner methods and asking some questions to the user. For example, if you want to take a one-dimensional array of String as input then you can first ask the user about the length of the array and then you can use a for loop to retrieve that many elements from user and store them in an array. You can use the next() to take a String input from the user. Similarly, if you need to take an integer array or double array, you can use nextInt() or nextDouble() method of Scanner class. Some programmer may still stuck and ask, how about taking a two-dimensional array as input? Well isn't that pretty easy by applying some maths?

Read more »