This is a list of 10 best practices that are more subtle than your average Josh Bloch Effective Java rule. While Josh Bloch's list is very easy to learn and concerns everyday situations, this list here contains less common situations involving API / SPI design that may have a big effect nontheless. I have encountered…
The Animal Sniffer Plugin is used to build signatures of APIs and to check your classes against previously generated signatures. This plugin is called animal sniffer because the principal signatures that are used are those of the Java Runtime, and since Sun traditionally names the different versions of its Java Runtimes after different animals, the plugin that detects what Java Runtime your code requires was called "Animal Sniffer".
The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using pure Java. In short, you can read and write MS Excel files using Java. Soon, you'll be able to read and write Word files using Java. POI is your Java Excel solution as well as your Java Word solution. However, we have a complete API for porting other OLE 2 Compound Document formats and welcome others to participate.