One aspect beats a hundred pastes

The first time I edited a piece on aspect-oriented progamming (AOP, also known as AOD for "aspect-oriented development"), I couldn't see past the logging examples and think of uses for AOP other than inserting new code into already-deployed instances. And while that's great, there's more to the concept, as Monika Krug writes in her first blog entry AOD and DRY.

DRY, in this case, means "don't repeat yourself", something that's often hard to do for small blocks of code that aren't suited to being their own methods, and hard to avoid when you've got that nice, friendly paste command on your menu bar. Her example shows a potentially much-repeated block of code for working through a possibly-empty Collection, and how an AspectJ aspect can eliminate the duplicate special-case blocks in not only the classes she's presented, but in any similar classes that might be developed in the future.

Also in weblogs, Andreas Schaefer expresses his concern about how Sun defends the Java trademark. In Sun vs. JavaGeeks.com: Does Sun own Java or only the Java(tm) Language, he discusses Sun's challenges to the name of the JavaGeeks.com website, saying " I was completely shocked that Sun is challenging this domain name especially because many other websites are using Java in their name"

Editor's Note: Chris Adamson is authoring this daily editor's blog for this first week of December. Daniel is very grateful.

In Also in Java Today , Elliotte Rusty Harold notes that instead of focusing on the ease that RELAX NG brings to tasks that can be accomplished using W3C Schema Language, you should look at the things that RELAX can do more. In RELAX NG with custom database libraries Harold writes "RELAX NG is not limited to one preordained collection of primitive data types with a limited set of facets for extension. RELAX NG enables developers to define custom type libraries that can assert any constraints a program can verify."

Michael Feathers says that passing nulls takes him back to warnings by his high school math teacher of the dangers of dividing by zero. In When Nulls Aren't Nasty, he explains that he passes in nulls all the time. He does it in test code not production code and gives examples of how and why.

In Projects and Communities, the Java Enterprise Community's home page links to Satya Komatineni's notes on localizing server side applications. "Items include managing two locales for your server side applications: one for language and one for formatting."

One of the richest pages in the JavaPedia is the page devoted to Patterns. A recent post to the discussion suggests you "refactor toward that pattern or away from it depending on whether the pattern's consequences, strengths, and trade-offs are appropiate for the program."

Continuing with the debate of whether to make switch() and case work with any object or primitive, Monika Krug weighs in with a perspective on primitive and objects in today's Forums. "I think not everything needs to be an object. Primitive data types, if structures, loops, methods should be just that, not be forced into being objects. 'Almost everything is an object' as in Java is great, 'absolutely everything is an object' as in Smalltalk makes the language unnecessarily complicated."

murphee disagrees with some ideas regarding treating functions and methods as first class objects: "I think learning several completely different languages (Java: OOP,managed memory; C: structured programming, own memory management; SML: functional, managed memory;,...) is a benefit. It's a nuisance at first, but it broadens your view. At my University (TU Graz) we did exactly that (we got taught: C, SML, Java in that order), and this gives you the best of all worlds. BTW *only* learning Java is not a good idea; students should be exposed to manual memory management at least once in their life, so they can actually see the advantages of managed memory."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• JSR 260 - Javadoc Tag Technology Update
• W3C Turns 10
• Confluence 1.3
• JAFS 0.97
• JExpress Professional 6.9
• JGraph 5.2

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