Java

Java may have stood the test of time, but it can still be a source of great frustration among many web developers. Dealing with its verbosity and infrastructure overhead, for example, can take hours, even for the most basic needs. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Gregor Ambrozic shows us how Grails and its many appealing features can be a viable alternative to traditional Java web applications frameworks.

In the realm of enterprise software, especially for software provided as a service, multitenancy ensures that data is truly isolated for each client within a shared instance of software. Among its numerous benefits, multitenancy can greatly simplify release management and cut down costs. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer André William Prade Hildinger shows us how Hibernate, a persistence framework for Java, makes implementing a multitenant Java EE application easier than it sounds.

Of all the modern ways people talk to each other, email seems to have stood the test of time and is arguably still one of the most effective and widely used means of communication. Thus, being able to programmatically send and receive emails can open new dimensions to a user's experience of software that powers human communication. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Francis Altomare shows us how he leveraged various Amazon Web Services technologies to build a simple communication application in which email itself is an important interface.

Java has been a dominant programming language for ages, but modern times call for modern languages. Meet Kotlin, a modern, clear, and expressive programming language powered by the same virtual machine technology that powers Java. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tomasz Czura takes us for a spin through the world of Kotlin and shows us how it can be used to make an Android application with an elegant architecture without compromising the very qualities of the code that Kotlin aims to provide.

The plethora of tutorials on building Android apps may have you thinking that making a mobile app is simple. In reality, however, performance issues can be very complicated, and because performance plays a key role in making sure that your app stays on your users' list of favorite apps for a long time, every little detail must be given full attention. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tibor Kaputa shares some tips on how you can optimize some common performance issues and identify some of the bottlenecks in your Android app.

Are you a Scala developer hoping to scale your application in the cloud? If so, meet Kubernetes, a cluster manager for Docker applications. Developed by Google, it's the latest in new open source tools making major waves. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra guides us through a step-by-step tutorial on how to take a generic Scala application and implement Kubernetes and Docker to launch multiple instances of the application.

The Scala language has continued to gain popularity over the last several years, thanks to its excellent combination of functional and object-oriented software development principles, and its implementation on top of the proven Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Creating a language that compiles to Java bytecode requires a deep understanding of the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machine. To appreciate what Scala's developers have accomplished, it is necessary to go under the hood, and explore how Scala's source code is interpreted by the compiler to produce efficient and effective JVM bytecode.

Clustering algorithms are very important to unsupervised learning and are key elements of machine learning in general. These algorithms give meaning to data that are not labelled and help find structure in chaos. But not all clustering algorithms are created equal; each has its own pros and cons. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Lovro Iliassich explores a heap of clustering algorithms, from the well known K-Means algorithm to the elegant, state-of-the-art Affinity Propagation technique.

Today, writing applications in languages that compile to JavaScript is a very common practice. Scala developers, for example, can use Scala.js and have the same language for both the server and the client. That said, Scala's compiler and standard dependency management tools are too limiting in the modern JavaScript world. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Michele Sciabarra shows us how to integrate Scala.js with the plethora of JavaScript modules available on NPM, using tools like Browserify, and explains how to do this without even having to install Node.js.