Can’t run Java plugin in Chrome for Mac OSX after installing Oracle JDK 7?

If you are using Mac OSX (i am on Lion)  and you just installed Oracle JDK / JRE 7  your Java applets in Chrome will stop working. You will basically be told Chrome does not support Java 7 on the Mac platform. A 64-bit browser (Safari or Firefox, for example) is required to run Java 7 on Mac OS X. 32-bit browsers such as Chrome do not support Java 7 on the Mac platform. Continue reading

Difference between Multi-Threading and Parallel Programming

Since the use of multi-core computers / PCs is common these days, there are more and more parallel programming frameworks coming up. If you use Scala (or Java)  you might have used the AKA framework which is based on Actors. In java 7 there are the Fork/ join APIs.  However you might ask why do we need these , since multithreaded apps are already quite common. If you use Servlets and so on you are automatically using multiple threads and JVM is a beast when it comes to scaling up using threads and utilising multiple cores.  Continue reading