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Wrong

Posted by editor on August 14, 2007 at 8:42 AM PDT


How to describe the pro- and anti- language change camps?

I think you are doing a disservice to the cause of no language changes by labeling us as "conservative" in general and defining language changes as "innovation".

I wasn't sure if the term "conservative" would be too politically loaded to use to describe those who are generally against the proposed Java 7 language changes, but this comment on yesterday's editor's blog makes me think that the political baggage got dragged in where it wasn't wanted. Another said "I do not consider myself as being conservative. Not politically and not in daily life," while jwenting clarified "We aren't so much conservative as in "resisting change" [...] but conservative as in "cautious"."

My dictionary's definition of "conservative" (this is from the Oxford American Dictionary that comes with the US version of Mac OS X, for what it's worth) didn't help matters by offering what is arguably a biased definition, saying that to be conservative is "cautious about change or innovation". Political conservatives probably don't consider the ideas they oppose to be "innovative" any more than this vocal part of the Java community feels that pining for closures ("just because Ruby has them", they say) is innovative.

In fact, my sense of the term goes way back to high school, when I did a presentation on the Greek comic poet Aristophanes. One of the sources I read made the claim that topical comedy is inherently conservative, in that it mocks the new, thereby implying the old ways were better. With this way of thinking, regardless of whether Arisophanes' favorite target, the Athenian Strategos Cleon, was "conservative" or "liberal" by any modern reckoning (if such reckoning even makes sense), there's a certain "conservative" sensibility in saying "the new leaders are asses and their stupid new ideas will lead us to ruin."

Then, compare that thought to this comment from the current poll feedback:

Give the generics, XML and closure fanboyz the boot. No, wait. Before you kick them out force them to clean up the mess they created during the last decade. And don't forget the hundreds of thousands of open bug reports in the dreaded bugparade.

But what do we call the relative camps proposing and resisting closures and the other language changes that have been suggested? And is it as simple as pro- and anti-change? Sure, some people write Java 1.4 code because they just like it better, but are there camps that just want to see Java's development take a different course, say, preferring to expose new functionality through new libraries rather than messing around with the language syntax?

Turning back to the Forums, which spurred yesterday's editor's blog, there's further discussion in the thread Re: Please stop promoting new frameworks and concentrate on Java stack, where the conservative cautious jwenting, quoted above, goes on to write: "As said, there's a point in which it gets to be too much of a good thing Though it's slowing down a bit and there's some consolidation there was a time not too long ago when a new web framework for Java was released somewhere just about every day. The differences were often minimal, the bugs plenty. Had those people joined forces with an existing project rather than go their own way they could have had the same thing they coded themselves in the context of that project instead, making it better for everyone. Of course some concepts are irreconcilable with any existing "framework" and do warrant their own project. Things like Struts and Spring are too different at heart, shouldn't be one product."

krippa asks,
Is it possible to use Glassfish as COSNaming service:
"I am trying to bind a Remote RMI-IIOP stub in a naming service. Doing so by creating the default InitialContext doesn't seem to work. I read something in a thread saying that it is "because you are supposed to use the COSNaming service with IIOP". Isn't the default configuration in glassfish a cosnaming service (the one in jndi.properties)? Can I configure glassfish to provide one? How? Or do I have to bind my stubs with the naming service provided by orbd (<JDK_HOME>/bin/orbd.exe)?"

Finally, jsl123 needs some guidance on
Calling WebService over Http.
"Hi, i have an application that needs to talk to a web service that is implemented as a straight http get request and it is unlikely to change. If it was a "proper" web service, then i could use the java webservice client code to call it, however as it isn't i wondered if anyone could advise on the best cause of action. Firstly is it ok to make an external http call within a managed function (I was probably going to use a message queue around the calls as well to allow for timeouts, etc)? Are there any issues i should be aware of? Ideally the call would run in its own thread which is why i was thinking of wrapping it in a message queue. Secondly if the above isn't possible/advised, what would people suggest instead."

Danny Coward's thoughts about the Java 7 language proposals are a highlight of the Java Today section.
"In light of some of the recent discussions about potential enhancements to the Java language, there has been general concern that the Java language will get too complicated and will be filled with esoteric features that only a few people want and will use." Danny looks at current proposals and the ideas behind them in Java Programming Language: Design Principles and Proposals. "As stewards of the Java Programming Language, we welcome such discussions and highlight some proposals here. " The article highlights the work being done in the Kitchen Sink Language project, and also links to some alternative views.

The JSR-291 (Dynamic Component Support for Java SE) expert group has posted their final release of the OSGi-based JSR. The spec defines a dynamic component framework for Java SE. "The dynamic component model supports assembly of applications from components and supports implementation detail hiding between components as well as lifecycle management of those components." An OSGI JSR-291 page hosts the spec, a reference implementation, and a TCK.

InfoQ's Niclas Nilsson takes note of the new multi-core era and asks Is Erlang the Java for the concurrent future, springing off of Ralph Johnson's blog Erlang, the Next Java. Niclas writes, "the Erlang take on concurrency differs from the mainstream languages by not having any shared state. The processes are very lightweight, and if a process wants to communicate with another process, it communicates by sending messages. This architecture makes it possible to scale and distribute systems in quite a different way than systems that uses shared memory for communication between processes or threads."

In today's Weblogs,
Kohsuke Kawaguchi presents
Yet more plugins from the community.
"The list of plugins for Hudson just keeps expanding. The last week added a plugin to interface with PMD/FindBugs/checkstyle/CPD as well as a plugin to scan through all FIXME/TODO kind of comments."

Arun Gupta describes "the exact steps to deploy your first JRuby application in GlassFish V3 Technology Preview builds" in
First JRuby on Rails App in GlassFish V3

Finally, Max Poon continues a deep dive in
Extending the NetBeans Tutorial JSF-JPA-Hibernate Application, Part 4.
"Switching from Hibernate JPA to Glassfish JPA/TopLink Essentials
SimpleJpaHibernateApp is developed based on JSR 220 Java Persistence API with optional Hibernate-specific options, e.g. in persistence.xml or @Cache Annotations for caching applied. Hence, due to the pluggability of the Java Persistence API architecture, JPA-compliant applications such as SimpleJpaHibernateApp can easily be switched to make use of other Java Persistence providers such as Glassfish JPA. This article describes how this can be done."

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How to describe the pro- and anti- language change camps?

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