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Shake It UpPosted by editor on February 1, 2007 at 7:04 AM PST
So just what do we mean by closures anyways? It serves the platform well to have a vigorous debate now about what should go into JDK 7 -- to dig through the pro's and con's of closures, a new properties syntax, a modular JDK, etc. -- and thereby prioritize what should go in. If one of these is a dud with the community, better to know now than after JDK 7 comes out. Closures came in a very close third in the recent poll What one feature would you most like to see in JDK 7, and was the highest-ranking language change. It's probably gotten the most discussion over the last few months, and has the advantage of already being backed with a concreted, if still-evolving, proposed specification, authored by some of the top luminaries in the Java world. But... just what are we talking about? Outside of the specification itself, can we speak consistently about what closures are, are not, and how they differ from anonymous inner classes? Neal Gafter has stepped in to provide A Definition of Closures, which traces closures back to their origins in Scheme and Smalltalk, and then makes the case for what they would be in Java:
The last part of Neal's blog makes the case that anonymous inner classes don't cut it, that they can be made to do the same things as closures, but not cleanly or effectively. Take a look and decide for yourself if this helps make the case for putting closures in the next version of Java SE. Also in Java Today, the JSR-296 Swing Application Framework prototype implementation is a small set of Java classes that simplify building desktop applications. The prototype provides infrastructure that's common to most desktop applications: application lifecycle, support for managing and loading resources, support for defining, managing, and binding Actions, and persistent session state. "The intended audience for this snapshot is experienced Swing developers with a moderately high tolerance for pain." Issue 276 of the NetBeans Community Newsletter is out, featuring NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5 ML, NetBeans Mobility Pack for CDC 5.5 with Demo, Intel Endorsement of NetBeans, New Hands-On Labs: Java SE 6, Web Services Security, a Cool Tip on Tabs, How to Create a Movie Player, Using the Ajax Map Viewer Component, High-level Introduction to NetBeans IDE & the Community and much more... In today's Weblogs. James Gosling announces that doc.java.sun.com is alive! (again): "doc.java.sun.com (the javadoc website designed for communal collaborative translation) is finally back up again after a couple of days being dead. It took so long because (tragically) I have a Real Job." Fabrizio Giudici works through some of the issues with Setting properties for JUnit testing and NetBeans: "Keeping an old habit since the old times of C/C++ development and Makefile, mostly under Unix, I usually set environment variables to specify some properties that should be available during compiling or testing. But environment variables can create troubles sometimes." Finally, Juggy The Java Finch's latest video interview is available: Mark Reinhold and Heather VanCura - discussing the future of Java at JavaPolis: "At JavaPolis, a very cool event that is run by the Belgium Java Users Group (BeJUG), I met very very interesting people."
In today's Forums,
Returning into a hot topic from a few months ago,
Finally, from the phoneME forum, 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. So just what do we mean by closures anyways? »
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