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Where Do You Think You're Going?

Posted by editor on February 10, 2006 at 9:27 AM EST

Are your frameworks more ready for J2SE 5 than you?

The latest poll question comes to us from Eitan Suez, who suggested a question that deals with frameworks adopting J2SE 5 coding practices, such as enums, annotations, and generics.

This has been a key point in the forums and other discussions of J2SE 5 features and "language bloat" in general. Those opposed to these features argue for a conservative approach to adding new language features, because once they're in, all developers will eventually be responsible for them. Adoption of those features by frameworks is one of the key ways we get to that point -- even if you don't use generics, what happens when your framework does? What happens when method signatures change to require them?

On the other hand, what if you're ready, and frankly sick of waiting, to really use the new features? Annotations were introduced to increase flexibility and introduce new forms of meta-programming. For those who want to, say, wrap a method with a fire-and-forget thread via an annotation like @OneWay, why wait for everyone else to catch up? After all, they say, J2SE 5 has been out for over a year, and Mustang's just a few months off... why not start using some of this stuff already?

So, with thanks to Eitan, the latest java.net Poll asks "What recent version of Java do you want third-party frameworks to support?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for results and discussion.

In Also in Java Today, the article Create iPod video content on the Java platform shares some practical (and potentially very popular) uses for mobile video, and then present two programs to get you started using the QuickTime for Java API to create video content for the iPod. These programs let you easily add captions to existing video files and convert legacy video files into an iPod-compatible format.

"A look at the list of Top Ten AJAX Applications shows that most of the currently discussed AJAX applications do break the Web's fundamental interaction style." But can you have your rich application and your refresh and back button too? In the dev2dev article Developing AJAX Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality, Mark Schiefelbein says you can do both, and he shows how.

In today's Forums, grandall discusses GUI testability in Re: No unit tests? "What I really meant in my previous reply was: You *never ever* do unit tests in a separate project, because the tests are intimately compiled against the very classes in the main project. e.g. If you change a method signature in a class, you go and change the test to use the new signature (e.g. if you drop a superfluous argument). When you work in this way you don't even check in until all the tests compile and pass. After all, why would you? A test represents a piece of behaviour that a developer has specified should work, so a broken test means you've broken that behaviour."

mthornton discusses illusory memory bloat in Re: Releasing unused heap memory to OS: "The Mem Usage column in Windows task manager reports the current working set size. This is the amount of memory which your process currently has mapped to physical memory and can be quite different than the amount of memory you have allocated. Minimizing an application has a side effect of clearing the working set (there is an option to prevent this). Thus regardless of how much memory you have allocated, after minimizing the value reported by 'Mem Used' will be small."

David Herron offers An easy way to enter the Mustang Regression contest in today's Weblogs: "Let me give you guys an interesting hint on entering the regression contest ... Suppose your application has a unit-test suite ... Simply run your test suite on a Tiger build (1.5 update 6 is the latest) and then on a Mustang build (JDK 6 build 70 is the latest) and compare the results."

Felipe Gaucho says The IDEs are driving us crazy: "If you are a member of a project in which every person could choose his own development environment, I'm sure you have painful experiences with the code-style, integration and even the project communication. It is so common I decided to register this situation here in my blog."

John Reynolds relates "A sad but pathetically true tale of 103 entries as a java.net blogger..." in Hello... My name is John, and I am a java.net blogger.

In Projects and Communities, the jai-imageio project, parent of all Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) Image I/O tools projects, has announced that as of this week, daily builds will now be available from their builds page. The parent project contains the sub-projects jai-imageio-core (the core API), and jai-imageio-demos (demonstration programs).

The Java Enterprise Community page is featuring Lance Andersen's blog Getting Started using Derby with Glassfish and SJSAS 8.2: "Glassfish and SJSAS 8.2 provide multiple ways to start the Derby Network Server as well as several useful scripts to help make your Derby use more productive"

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Are your frameworks more ready for J2SE 5 than you?
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