Peter Rooke

If you really must then the @Async tag, but I'm not sure you need this.  Creating Asynchronous Methods

To quote one of the old clever programmers;
"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." [Donald Knuth].

The exact same byte-for-byte WAR/JAR/EAR should be installed in production as was used for development and testing.

I've worked on a few projects where the customer has had one company hosting the solution, and others developing the software.
On these projects the environment configuration (properties) has to be outside of the main artefacts (EAR/JAR).

Of course, when issues happen (and they always do) the blame game; its your environment against no its your software! 

Wiki Functional Programming Languages

Twenty years ago, I had a broken keyboard with no Escape key.  To this day I'm often in vi, and still use "Control-[" which was my work-around!     

Many years back I worked in speech technology; around 1990 Dragon had just launched their new product "dragon dictate" which was a major improvement on their previous products.
Apricot  Computers where trying to market this product within the UK, and accepted an invite to appear on the BBC program Tomorrows World.  Problem was that it took a few hours the "train" the product, and the programme producers insisted that their presenter would demo the product.  The presenter spent a few hours doing the training, however a camera man managed to trip the power and all the training data was lost.  So they went ahead and the product just completely failed to recognise the presenters words.  Sadly Apricot pulled out of the market a few weeks later.  

Oddly the software never struggled to recognise words spoken in a Geordie accent, which is more than most non Newcastle natives can say.

Tonight we find out who will win the 2018 world cup.  Its not the final yet, but I just don't see any of the other teams beating Belgium or France.  
I'm expecting it to be Belgium, if they can overcome a very good French team. 

held in Europe, South America or Mexico. You don't have the icehockey championships in Brazil either.

I noticed that some referee decisions in earlier matches were very dubious - but then realised that they were, of course, using ref's from counties were the game is played at a much lower standard.  I don't see how a referee from Saudi would have the experience to handle an aggressive South American / European side, when all the players know and use all the many tricks (like diving).        

Yes, added sugar was always the problem. 

It seems healthy food is always second to a healthy economy as far as the (UK) government is concerned. 

Currently the uk is considering lifting the current (EU) ban on [nasty American] chlorinated chicken, regardless of any health issues this may cause.  Its all about trade!  I confess I don't know too much about "chlorinated" chicken - but I don't see the health benefits of eating meat that has been washed in chlorine. Expect it cheap to produce however.  

Similar situation with the sugary drinks, the manufacturers have had considerable money to lobby [bribe] the various governments.  Milk industry too, it not common knowledge that adult humans don't really digest cows milk easily. 

Guess you have to take "advise" with a pinch of salt!     

For a sports tourer, I'll go for a Z - either a Z1000 or Z600.  Flexible as they can be a normal sporty bike but also could tour with baggage.  If you like speed then the H2 SX,  (not sure it would be any use in America).  Or for something that does everything then an adventure bike like the BMW GS. 

Difficult to offer advise as it really depends upon where and how you ride.   Given the choice, I'll go for the KTM Super Duke R - but we have many twisty roads.      

Would it not be far easier to use an application server with EJB's?  I hear that EJB3 is not as horrific as EJB2 (shudder those interfaces).    

I guess you could start here; Spring Transaction Managment

Unless you really need them, then I've avoid global (XA) transactions and all the complexities of two phase commits.  Its all gets very complex and systems can suffer with performance issues.  Spring does offer support for global transaction management but the underling resources must support XA transactions.

Brazil are starting to play their special style of football, hope they do well (and win). 
Pretty common for teams to start slow, just do enough in the first few matches against lesser teams.

On another topic, I often wonder when FIFA will realise that football is not really ever going to take off in America.  Seems a bit odd to give the hosting of 2026 to the USA, with some matches in Mexico (fair enough) and Canada.   

Just reading this article --> Oracle's new Java SE subs and it appears that Big Red has finally decided to start charging for Java SE usage.  Not sure how this will effect open source implementations, but not good for Java.

VAR - yeah, it's like that with technology - everyone thinks it will be the solution to solve all the problems. 
Of course, [IMHO] the real issue is the political bias (corruption) that underlies each game.

Cannot decide if the old established teams (Brazil, Germany, Spain) has lost form, or the newer footballing nations are improving.   

What are peoples predictions?

Having seen most of the favourite teams, I'm now expecting Spain to win.  Brazil will of course be hard to beat, and Germany as aways.

Some surprises already, with very strong teams losing their first matches!   

These are extension points in the Spring framework, so really only used if you wish to extend the actual framework to offer a feature that does not exist.

Maybe using @PostConstuct and @PreDestroy would be a better solution.  

setting some variable to null

-    don't do that!