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Time to deprecate javac?

Posted by daniel on October 13, 2004 at 1:28 PM EDT

The Mustang Forum rocks on.

If you have been following the discussion forums this last week, you have seen tons of suggestions for what is important to Java developers for the J2SE 6.0 "Mustang" release. The topics have been wide ranging and the resulting discussion has pointed to a lot of deep thinking in the community.

In today's Forums, Bruce Chapman waits for the laughter to subside after he suggests we deprecate javac and then he explains "5.0 has a new tool "apt" which is a better javac. It allows us (mere mortals) to run our own code inside the compiler which can examine the source being compiled (via mirror API - similar to reflection or javadoc API), generate other code (sourcecode which will then be compiled, as well as bytecode if you have the inclination), and generate compiler errors if we detect something out of spec."

TSinger's suggestion is " 'const' applied to methods, references are an absolute MUST HAVE for medium-sized to large applications. Maybe one can apply the "const" to classes/interfaces as well to enforce immutable objects."

Opinali adds "My #1 wish for Mustang is simple: "int[2,3] matrix". I was once in favor of JSR-83 (Multiarray package), but now that the Java language is more open to syntax improvements, we can just drop that JSR. We don't need a full-blown Fortran clone (BLAS libraries, etc.) bundled with every JRE, less than 1% of Java apps need this kind of functionality. We need only the most fundamental feature: multidimensional arrays in the core typesystem."

Add your thoughts to the Mustang forum discussion.

Is it time to give up emacs? In today's Weblogs, Tom Ball writes about New Tricks for Old Dogs. He says that he, a NetBeans developer, has moved over from using emacs to NetBeans for his own development. His admission of what he's used in the past led me to read his post about his recent move a little more carefully.

Andreas Schaefer reports the continuing existence of what he calls a bug. Others are not so sure. In Cloneable: How an old Bug can bite for a very long time he points out the missing public Object clone() method in java.lang.Cloneable.

Wow, it's only been out a month or so but Inderjeet Singh blogs that "Airport Express is one of the favorite gadgets for techies." In Resetting Airport Express he lists "the different ways to reset it since that is frequently used (though hard-to-find) operation when things go wrong during hacking."

In Also in Java Today , Heinz M Kabutz is sharing his version of a thread warning system in Automatically Detecting Thread Deadlocks . He writes that he has created a "new warning system, that notifies me if we have too many threads. In order to not get too many notifications, I take the approach that you get one warning when we pass the thread count threshold. If you slip below the threshold, and go above it again, you will get another warning notification. This is the same approach taken by the memory bean. Better would probably be to have a high- and low-water mark. In addition, it can also tell if there are deadlocked threads. "

One advanced topic getting more attention is bytecode manipulation, and among the various entries in the field, the ASM toolkit is particularly successful. Projects such as Groovy, BeanShell and AspectWerkz now use ASM, thanks to its light weight and high performance. In Using the ASM Toolkit for Bytecode Manipulation, Eugene Kuleshov introduces an interface and uses bytecode manipulation to implement it in arbitrary code.

In Projects and Communities , the Jini community's Thor project allows "Jini services to retrieve runtime configuration information across the network, but allow that information to be administered in a central fashion (i.e. an adminstrator at his PC)."

MyJXTA is available via JNLP and features some JDNC components. Up next, "adding style sheets, trimming content and setting widget preferred sizes but at this point the hard work looks to be behind us."

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The Mustang Forum rocks on.
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