Improvements to section on 'volatile'

The site's section on the Java volatile keyword has been expanded to include information such as:

• a tabular comparison of volatile and synchronized
• the definition of volatile and its significante under Java 5
• clearer guidance on when to use volatile.

New section on sorting

A new section on sorting has been added to the Java Collections section of the web site. The section currently contains information on:

• Intrudction on sorting
• Simple sorting of strings (sorting a list or array of "naturally sortable" objects)
• The Comparable interface, used to dictate the "natural sort order" of objects
• The false economy of compreTo optimisations
• Comparators, used to dicate the sort order for a particular sort, or for classes whose sort order can't otherwise be specified.
• An analysis of Java's sort algorithm, including a look at its performance.

The latter section shows that, if your application makes repeated sorts of very small data sets, an alternative sort algorithm may be beneficial.