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It's dynamic

Posted by daniel on March 22, 2005 at 7:21 AM EST

Don't call it scripting anymore

Tom McQueeny asks in his blog, Are the scripting languages threatening Java? He writes "New languages and new web frameworks will have to prove themselves. They're not going to steamroll over Java without some real projects proving their mettle over Java in the long term. I do have a concern that some software development managers, in their quest for Cheaper, Faster, Lighter software, might fall for the hype of the scripting language du jour and hire inexperienced developers ("Hey, they're right out of college but they can program in PHP!") to write web applications in PHP or Perl because they've heard these languages will result in faster delivery. The result could indeed be fast delivery -- of horrendously complex, intertwined, unmaintainable code."

In Also in Java Today , Lynn Greiner of DevSource has gathered five experts in dynamic languages to comment on The State of the Scripting Universe. The group includes Perl's Damian Conway, Python's Guido van Rossum, Ruby's Dave Thomas, Tcl's Jeff Hobbs, and PHP's Rohan Pall. Van Rossum notes "The term 'scripting language' is becoming more an more of a misnomer; many people nowadays prefer 'dynamic languages,' referring to the lack of compile-time type checking."

If you work with threaded code and are moving to J2SE 5.0, the check out the Core Java Tech tip Getting to know Synchronizers . The tip looks at the recent additions to the "mechanisms for coordinating between different threads in an application. This added support is provided by the new java.util.concurrent package. The package includes classes that offer semaphores, barriers, latches, and exchangers."

In today's Weblogs , Michael Nascimento Santos explains A tricky issue with java.awt.Font. " If you deal with GUIs, do some printing in your applications, play with custom drawing, use report software or anything that deals with fonts in Java, be aware of an important limitation in the API. "

Scott Schram reports Nasa Explores Eclipse Rich Client Platform. " Jeff Norris and Mark Powell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory gave a fascinating presentation at EclipseCon regarding NASA's adoption of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for Mars rover mission planning software."

Sebastian Lohmeier has been Trying the obvious. " The codehost project at jini.org explores new ways in classloading that take advantage of the convention to prefix Java packages with a reversed domain name."

In Projects and Communities, the Global Education and Learning Community home page is featuring JLogic, a digital circuit simulator. The project recently graduated from the incubator and the project owner shared some of his thoughts in a recent interview.

Slashdot has a report and discussion on the release of Narya, an open-source gaming toolkit from the developers of Puzzle Pirates. Members of the Java Games community might find this a good way to get started.

Can you Make java.util.Iterator usable in a for statement? In today's Forums, cbare writes "OK, I'll buy the explaination that something like this: List<Widgets> list = getWidgets();is probably better practice than: Iterator<Widgets> iterator = getWidgetsIterator();"

The === operator thread has returned. Wgauvin writes "If you want an equality operator, [..] (a === b) would map to something like ((a==b) || ((a != null) && a.equals(b)) [..] this would catch if both a and b were null, either one was null."

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Don't call it scripting anymore
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