Skip to main content

Gut Feeling

Posted by editor on December 5, 2005 at 11:31 AM EST

How to tell when someone is "thinking in Java"

Use a language long enough and you'll adjust your thinking to it. For a very brief time in high school, I paid enough attention to French class that I believed I could think in French for short periods -- I specifically remember one time in English class taking a note in French because there was a shorter way to express something in French than in English (probably one of those marvelously convenient words like donc or jusqu'a). Of course, this applies to Java as well. Not for nothing is one of the most popular books called Thinking in Java.

Two items on the front page have to do with the idea of getting the most out of Java by adapting your thinking appropriately. In the Book Club discussion of Beyond Java, rickcarson closes his post, Re: Chapter 4: Glass Breaking, with this anecdote:

By analogy, I had a friend I introduced to Java who was a big fan of Pascal. Initially he complained about a lack of enums. Later on I found out he was using arrays for everything because he didn't trust other people's libraries for things like ArrayList and Vector (due largely to bad experiences with Microsoft's IIS libraries). I convinced him to give the sun ones a chance. A couple of years later I caught up with him again and asked him about enums. He said that he didn't miss them any more, somewhat surprised I asked him why not - and he said that if you program properly in 'the Java way' you don't need them.

But what does Thinking In Java get you? A job, maybe. In his weblog, When you know that a programmer is a Java programmer, Kirill Grouchnikov writes:

Suppose you have an excellent Perl developer and a good Java developer. Which one should you take to your Java project? Arguably, an excellent non-Java developer can learn Java syntax in 4-5 days. But is syntax everything you need to know to write excellent Java code? How much time will it take until he starts to write Java code that looks like Java code and not like Perl code (don't forget that working on team means that the code is maintained by everybody, and even if somebody leaves, his code stays)? Do big projects really need "stellar" developers, or perhaps a team of good developers with solid Java knowledge does better job in the long run?

Also in today's Weblogs, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart offers a heads-up about Java EE 5 specifications in PFD: "The GlassFish Community is implementing the Java EE 5 specifications. Almost all those specifications are now in the Proposed Final Draft stage, which means they are done, except for fixing substantial problems. Here is a list of pointers to the specification documents..."

John Reynolds discusses Form Validation in an SOA context: "This blog continues the classic client-side versus server-side validation discussion, but now adds another layer - web service "side" validation. How can you share validation logic across client-side JavaScript, Java within the web application, and Java within underlying web services?"

Also in today's Forums, linuxhippy wonders How much improvement can be expected in the future? "I ask this question myself many times thinking about the quite good code generated by HotSpot-Server. On the other side I still see 5% improvements for numerical benchmarks like SciMark which I thought are almost optimal and have only little room for further optimizations. Of course it really depends which code you're running but in general, how much improvement can we expect in the next couple of years in general (summing up all kind of java-software)? I see great improvements in EA in conjunction with lock-removeal and stack-allocation (please in Mustang!). What else could be done to improve raw performance?"

This week's Spotlight features SwingLabs: "The SwingLabs project describes itself as "a Sun Microsystems supported project that allows experimentation with extensions to existing Swing components, new Swing components, and other desktop related technologies such as Java2D, AWT, etc. It acts as a testbed for ideas related to client side techologies. Successful experiments will be considered for inclusion into future vesions of the JDK." As well as being the parent to the prominent JDesktop Integration Components (JDIC) and JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) projects, SwingLabs has a number of smaller, focused projects, like the latest version of the SwingWorker for thread-safe long-running Swing tasks."

In Also in Java Today, you may have heard of "on-demand computing" from some of the big companies in the industry, but what does it really mean, and what will it do for you? In What Is On-Demand Computing Stephen B. Morris digs into this new line of thinking and looks at where it aspires to go: "on-demand computing (ODC) provides an infrastructural solution to the needs of modern organizations. Risk can be managed and running costs can be lowered by migrating to a more automated IT business infrastructure. Very few (if any) businesses operate today in a truly on-demand fashion. For this reason, ODC is a migration (not a forklift upgrade) target for today's infrastructures. The end result of this migration will allow for a more automated, business-policy-driven model."

"In order to use AJAX and Mozilla XUL with JSF, component writers have to make sure to provide any resource files need by these technologies, such as images, style sheets, or scripts. The standard approach to providing resource files for a JSF component library is to serve them directly out of the web application root file system." The article AJAX and Mozilla XUL with JavaServer Faces: Loading Resources With Weblets introduces the java.net Weblets project, which helps with this by providing resources from a JAR, rather than serving them from the file system.

In Projects and Communities, NetBeans Day Toronto is being held today, December 5, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC), in room 715AB, from noon to 5:15 PM. Presentations include introductions to plug-in development and building rich client applications, three variations on "What Makes NetBeans the Best?" (including J2ME and J2EE versions), and a closing keynote by James Gosling.

The JavaDesktop Community page is featuring Scenic, a scene-based 2D graphics library for Java, which has just graduated from the community incubator. Scenic aims to be fast and offer high quality graphics by directly using the capabilities of modern graphics cards. The project supports a handful of cards on Windows and Linux and seeks C++ developers who know DirectX or OpenGL.

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to thejava.net News RSS feed.

Current and upcoming Java Events :

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.



How to tell when someone is "thinking in Java"
Blog Links >>