Java
1)The runtime system guarantees that static initialization blocks are called in the order that they appear in the source code. 2) To debug Java XML Parsers set jaxp.debug system property to 1 or true. It will print lots of messages regrading which parser classes/properties JAXP is picking up etc. 3) JTDS/SQL Server While querying a IMAGE type column, if you are expecting getObject() to return byte[], pass useLOBs=false in the JDBC url. 4) static import Use it if you want unqualified access to static member of a type without inheriting from the type. import static x.y.z.StaticMemeber; .... access StaticMember here without qualifying it .... real life example of this is importing the Matchers in junit. import static org.hamcrest.CoreMatchers.is; or: import static org.hamcrest.CoreMatchers.*; and then you can call is() as if it is a function defined in same class where it is being used. 5) FTPClient I was using FTPClient to upload files to an FTP