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Not removing bugs

Posted by daniel on September 8, 2004 at 9:58 AM EDT

Making the tough decisions to leave bugs in - for now.

Today is Kimmy-the-wonderwife's birthday. We celebrated quietly at home. There is the traditional cake and ice cream, some home made cards, and presents. It's not clear how best to celebrate other anniversaries. I get email each year from a Java developer I know on the anniversary of a bug he filed many years ago that remains unresolved.

In today's Weblogs , Graham Hamilton feels the pain of those who have submitted bugs over the years and is fighting his first impulse to have these squashed. In Stabilizing the Tiger Release he writes that he is "sorry that not every possible bug fix has gone into Tiger. But we are doing a balancing act and the engineering teams have been carefully assessing all the candidate bugs. I know priorities can look different from different angles (especially if a given bug is interfering with your app!) but we've been trying to be thoughtful and to balance for the overall community good. Tiger contains a lot of important new features and also a lot of significant bug fixes and we want to deliver it to the community in a safe and timely way. That requires a driving focus on stabilizing the release and thus on progressively clamping down on change. I know this is an imperfect process, but we try to make the best choices we can."

Daniel Brookshier reports from the education community and suggest that you "Try to imagine what people are using Java for in the education and research world. Then think again, because this list of new projects is amazing. From NASA to pictures, there are some very interesting ideas here. Take a look at the current harvest from the Education and Learning Community (JELC)."

Jeff Kesselman has the Post Labor day blues. He reports on his development efforts and then on the games he's been playing with. In passing he bemoans the fact that you cannot delete directories in CVS.

In Also in Java Today , there are potential performance problems dealing with large XML files - an in-memory approach, like DOM, is wholly unsuitable for working with files of unknown and potentially infinite size. Instead, as Eugene Kuleshov writes, "applications based on SAX or the new StAX APIs can process documents iteratively during parsing" and as an added bonus, they allow you "chain handlers together in order to implement sophisticated transformations and processing rules." In Parsing and Processing Large XML Documents with Digester Rules, Eugene demonstrates the Jakarta Digester, a SAX-based XML parser that allows you to extend its processing with custom rules.

In part one of Annotations in Tiger, Brett McLaughlin shows you how to Add metadata to Java code. Brett writes that "annotations are pretty easy to understand and use. That said, the standard annotation types that come with Tiger are rather bare-boned and leave much to be desired. Metadata is increasingly useful, and you'll certainly come up with annotation types that are perfect for your own applications."

In Projects and Communities , the transcript from the wireless chat on JavaLive has been posted with questions and answers on the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) Wireless Toolkit 2.2.

Help select the cover person for the upcoming Head First Design Patterns book. Take a look at the options and then JavaRanch members can post their comments.

There are things you can't say discussed in today's Forums. Jonathan Simon introduces the topic "This chapter is focused on social norms and acceptance of what you can and can't say without negativity from society. [Are] there possibly lurching, fundamental flaws of Java that we are afraid to admit to ourselves? In 20 years, are we not going to be concerned with what we were wearing around 2004, but be saying "Jeez, I can't believe I was coding in Java!" Or, do these concepts just not apply to programming." ,

John M responds to a post" Fashions make comebacks about 20 years later. Is there also a correlation between programming practices and revitalized fashions?Sure, but they often come back with a different name and with a twist... For example, hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans and CASE tools => MDA (um, er, model-driven architecture)."

Rhythos responds to this looking back, saying " No one is allowed to say "Oh my! Why on earth were they using punch cards?!" because the technology and ideas hadn't progressed to the point where anything else was usable. Maybe we're all smart enough to recognize that there is a reason why people use backwards technology - it's because they don't know any better until someone comes along with a brilliant idea from no where, or because someones brilliant idea sparked a new brilliant idea is another."

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