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The changing landscape of programming

Posted by daniel on October 14, 2004 at 12:16 PM EDT

Do you write code? Not can you write code, but do you?

Max Goff begins his final installment in his Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper series with that challenge. He includes an excerpt with details of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) used in the moon missions and launches into a look at postmodern (pomo) computer programming.

Alan Kay is delivering the Turing lecture in a couple of weeks at this year's OOPSLA conference in Vancouver. Kay often talks about the programming that was done decades ago on constrained devices and challenges us to go further with our applications today. Read the details of the AGC and consider the power of the cellphone that you carry in your pocket. The possibilities are pretty exciting. As we write to abstraction piled on framework piled on large collections of libraries, what are we gaining and what are we losing? Take a look at Max's article and weigh in in the talkback section.

In today's Weblogs, Bruce Tate blogs about Time, wisdom, and AOP. He says that "we need to look for ways to use AOP with training wheels. We'll see limited techniques that simulate AOP behavior, like interceptors. We'll see frameworks that let you configure prepackaged AOP services, like Spring. With technologies like these, we'll be able to use limited AOP power, and get some limited benefit. All of this time, we can more safely collect the wisdom that will make it possible to push AOP from small, expert-laden successful projects to the mainstream."

Andreas Schaeffer follows up on his previous blog entry with his Proposal to fix the Cloneable Problem. Let him know if you think he has it this time.

In Also in Java Today , looking to get started with Spring? Take a look at the OCI article Spring MVC. Paul Jensen explains "Using the Dependency Injection framework as a foundation, Spring adds support for many common aspects of application functionality including persistence, transaction control, AOP, error handling, and distributed computing."

Underneath the JTable is the TableModel. As Michael Abernethy writes in Ease Swing development with the TableModel Free framework, " nearly all of the code in each TableModel is identical to the code in every other TableModel, and the code that is different doesn't really belong in a compiled Java class anyway." He introduces "the framework and code that makes up the TMF [TableModel Free] framework -- a combination of code that I've written and commonly used open source projects. With this framework, developers can reduce the size of a TableModel from hundreds of lines of code to a single line, and put the important table information in an external XML file."

In Projects and Communities , the JavaDesktop Community's Swing Component Depot contains links to dozens of high-quality component collections, from widget collections like JGoodies to specialized components like charts, graphs, and maps.

Whirlycache is a fast, configurable in-memory object cache for Java that speeds up websites and applications by caching objects that would otherwise have to be created by querying a database or by another expensive procedure.

Is it time to add closures to Java? In today's Forums, Ahoma writes "Yes it is syntactic sugar a lot of people say, but take a look what you can do with Groovy. You can express your algorithm in a lot less lines. The code becames more readable, and in some cases it can be describing an algorithm a lot better. Closures are nothing more than inner classes that encapsulates a sequance of code."

DGriffit would like to see Batch File Operations. "One thing I've been hoping for is a standard utility library which would allow the definition of file sets (via regexes, recursive traversal of directories, inclusion/exclusion, etc.) and operations on those sets of files (delete, move, copy, all the usual suspects). "

What if you only had to download those parts of the JRE that you needed? Cowwoc writes "The key here is providing end-users with a "download-on-the-fly JRE". That is, ship Java Webstart with the absolute minimum dependencies. If it must be a native installer, so be it. This new version of Java Webstart would be smart enough so that if my application tries using a JRE core class/package that has not been downloaded yet, it'll go to Sun's server and download it automatically. As time passes, the user will get more and more classes installed on their machine and more applications will run out-of-the-box without having to download any JRE classes."

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Do you write code? Not can you write code, but do you?
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