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On the Other Side of the Mountain

Posted by editor on July 8, 2005 at 6:33 AM PDT

Size isn't everything

Back in Java 1.0, O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell handbook was a modest brown book, weighing in at 438 pages. The J2SE 5.0 edition is a desk-cracking 1225 pages, and it leaves out all of the desktop packages: AWT, Swing, JavaSound, etc. The book's preface notes that Java has grown from Java 1.0's 212 classes in 8 packages to J2SE 5.0's 3562 classes in 166 packages.

This immediately raises the question "Is Java too big for its own good?" After all, there is an astonishing amount of stuff in here. How can a new programmer make any kind of sense of it or even know where to begin? On the other hand, surely each feature was demanded by someone out there, probably in a huffy forum post along the lines of "I can't believe Java doesn't support this... Sun better get its act together or I'm switching to Windows!" Stop me if you've seen that one before.

We've decided to make the question of "Is the Java SE API too big" the subject of the java.net poll for the next week. Please visit the front page and cast your vote, then join the discussion on the results page.

One thing that prompted us to make this the poll is an evolving discussion in the forums. The topic Add good open source layout mangers into JDK started back in November, but picked up recently with a proposal to add TableLayout to the JDK. This prompted replies that core Java is already too big and that any additions only increase the bloat.

In To the "Purists", alexlamsl makes the argument that discussion of proposed features needs to take place without always raising the problem of platform bloat as a universal objection: "I do understand your ideals about keeping a certain language platform compact hence maximising the ease of learning and deployment etc. However, what I would like to say is that this is a forum section which welcomes collects the general community's ideas and suggestions. Although it is trivial that not every single suggestion would get itself into the Java Language Platform, it is equally vital to let these ideas flow around and let others to argue back and forth so as to decide whether they are actually worth their values."

Also in today's Forums, dochez clarifies Mac OS support in glassfish...:
"Did you build the workspace or just download the linux bits ? download[ing] the linux bits and trying to make it work on mac is not supported, you need to modify the asadmin.template in the lib/install/templates to add the derby property. the easiest at this point is to checkout the sources and build, then everything should be fine, otherwise wait for next week when I am hoping to get a Mac promotion."

Michael Nielsen offers another "future of java" entry in today's Weblogs.
"Regarding recent musings on naming of Java SE 8. Looking at the trend, people are leaning towards the elephantine. I'd look further down the road: my vote, 'Phoenix'."

Apple's JavaOne BoF's "were surprisingly generous with details about how the Intel transition will (and won't) affect Mac Java programmers. Plus, making the "A-ha" video with your iSight."

Jody Garnett has a bit more on the Where 2.0 Conference, "with some notes for those considering location based services."

In Also in
Java Today,
Budi Kurniawan thinks servlet filters are great, but for one significant

gotcha: you cannot change the request parameters of an incoming

HttpServletRequest. This greatly hinders obviously beneficial uses, like

validating or trimming the user's input before reaching any business

logic. Fortunately, design patterns offer a solution, and in Decorating

Servlet Request Objects, he shows how to get around this by using the

Decorator pattern.

"Irrespective of the language programmers choose for expressing solutions,

their wants and needs are similar. They need to be productive and

efficient, with technologies that do not get in the way, but rather help

them produce high-quality software." With this, Murugan Pal offers up the

results of his survey of fellow SpikeSource developers in the ONLamp.com

article What Developers Want.

In Projects and
Communities, the latest Java Tools Community Newsletter announces the graduation of the JEvaluate project from the community incubator. JEvaluate is a library to evaluate mathematical expressions defined as String objects, and its syntax is not "programmer oriented", making it better suited for end-users.

If you saw James Gosling's JavaOne Thursday keynote

or were at NetBeans Day the previous Sunday, you saw the

Joplin music player

when it was built in real-time onstage

using the

NetBeans/Matisse

GUI builder.

Please read about the

Joplin project

and consider joining it!

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Size isn't everything

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