It's a situation nearly every Java developer faces - Murphy's Law strikes at the most inconvenient moment: a critical application upon which everything depends suffers from an elusive heap memory leak and begins throwing OutOfMemoryErrors.

Of all of the possible technologies to arise out of the first consumer Internet revolution, instant messaging (IM) is a bit of an enigma. Its incredible popularity challenges that of the Internet's first 'killer app,' e-mail, yet it does so mostly by offering the features of e-mail in ...