Editor's Daily Blog: Tall Cafe Mocha to go

To a midwesterner used to the change of seasons, it doesn't really feel like fall here at the Mac OS X conference in Santa Clara, California. It's a fun conference with cool talks on Subversion, automation, and plenty of coding tricks, techniques, and worthwhile conventions. But there is not the change of colors, falling leaves, or smell of fall that we get back home this time of year. It's the time to sit in the back yard in front of a fire with a warm cup of cocoa fortified by a shot of espresso.

Honestly, I wasn't even thinking of this until I went to Stu Halloway's excellent talk yesterday on Cocoa for Java programmers. Of course his talk had nothing to do with autumn in Cleveland. He presented some of the gotchas for experienced Java programmers who would like to program in Objective C using the Cocoa framework for targetting Mac OS X development.

The first obvious difference is the syntax of swapping the dots used to call methods in Java ( i.e. foo.bar().anotherCall().stillAnotherCall() ) for nested square brackets. He moved on to memory management issues and reflection. In each case he was able to quickly explain a Cocoa concept by using Java as a common frame of reference. There are enough Java programmers that many books and presentations are beginning from the standpoint of assuming you understand the Java programming language. In the early years of Java, the reverse was true. You saw titles like Java for C developers. We are now the establishment we once tried to overthrow.

In today's Weblogs, John Reynold has responded to reader requests with Tapestry Component Examples: contrib:Tree and contrib:Table in which he "created a suit of examples on how to use the Tapestry Tree component. I've also added some new examples to the Tapestry Table component suite."

In Also in Java Today , Eugene Kuleshov is exploring the ASM Bytecode Toolkit, applying it to the metadata feature introduced in J2SE 5.0. In Create and Read J2SE 5.0 Annotations with the ASM Bytecode Toolkit, he shows how annotations are represented in Java bytecode, and how the ASM bytecode-manipulation toolkit can work with them, even in pre-5.0 JVMs, noting that the article's code "allows you to read annotation data that is not available through the Java 5 reflection API."

Brian Goetz most recent article on "Java theory and practice" explains More flexible, scalable locking in JDK 5.0 . He describes the new locking model in Tiger and motivates the change by saying that pre-Tiger "synchronization is good, but not perfect. It has some functional limitations -- it is not possible to interrupt a thread that is waiting to acquire a lock, nor is it possible to poll for a lock or attempt to acquire a lock without being willing to wait forever for it. Synchronization also requires that locks be released in the same stack frame in which they were acquired, which most of the time is the right thing (and interacts nicely with exception handling), but a small number of cases exist where non-block-structured locking can be a big win."

In Projects and Communities , the Mac Java community links to a MacDevcenter article by Mike Butler on Making Cocoa-Java apps scriptable so AppleScripts can be used to automate your Java applications on the Mac.

The Java Games community features a forum on J2ME game development. Check out this thread on the challenges of developing a J2ME wordbuilding game.

Vikstar would like to " Allow passing of primitive types to generic declarations. There are many useful places for this, one example is anyware where seperate methods have to be created for each number primitive type."

Dog provides an example of how "the 'class' keyword would be very useful. It is a common pattern to say something like:private final static Logger = new Logger(MyClass.class.getName());when copying around code it is often easy to miss the reference to the MyClass class and end up logging in the wrong place. The 'class' keyword would solve this."

In today's Forums, Monika Krug " would like a method in FileWriter that adds the system-dependent linebreak character after the line: .writeln(String). As FileWriter inherits its write methods from OutputStreamWriter and Writer, it should probably be defined in one of these."

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

October 24-28, 2004 OOPSLA 2004
October 27, 2004 Jini Community Webinar
October 30, 2004 JaMU - JUG Indonesia:Compiere and Jasper
October 30, 2004 JUG Sardegna meeting

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