For the last few quarters we've been laboring over a new version of iCopyright's flagship product, the Instant Clearance Service. The good folks at Blink Interactive did a usability study and came up with two big improvements which have been live for a few months now.

The Java language lacks a tuple type, so when you need to return more than one object from a method call, you need to create a value object to hold the pieces. As noted in a recent Java Posse Podcast, Java has no Pair object in its standard libraries. Here's our implementation of a reusable Pair object, built with Java generics.

The Jakarta Commons project recently released version 1.6 of their open-source Java configuration library. Code to handle project configuration isn't, admittedly, the sexiest of technologies — but the Jakarta project does it exactly right. Its "composite configuration" features are particularly useful to manage configuration settings for different runtime environments.

iCopyright Discovery is a fairly new Java program we've been working on that scours the web for potential copyright infringement. Because it does a lot of pulling content off of the web as part of its job, by refactoring it into a multithreaded application build around a producer/consumer work queue, we increase throughput dramatically.