Vincent Brabant's Blog

Javapolis 2004 University Day 1: JDK 5.0 In Action

Firstly, I was amazed that they were using a Apple portable. Reason why I was amazed is that JDK 5.0 is not yet available for Apple's PC.

I was thinking how they will show JDK 5.0 in action with a portable running under Apple Mac OS X.

But in fact, it was only presentation of slides. So, in fact no "JDK 5.0 in Action".

The first part of the presentation was the most interresting. The reason was that second part of the presentation was exactly the same as the one given by Neal Gafter at Javapolis 2003 ( JSR-176: Forthcoming Java Programming Language Features by Neal Gafter [ Sun Microsystems ]).

I really think that Javapolis people would avoid to organize two times the same presentation.

The best part of the JDK 5.0 in action was when they show a very simple but complete test framework that run every methods of a class having a @test annotation and indicating how much methods failed or success. I am curious to see presentation of TestNG to know if it's based upon the same principle.

What I also liked was the fact that Joshua Bloch, working now for Google, speaked about NetBeans and encourage people to install it.

As a netBeans Community Member, I can also encourage you to download the release 4.0 of NetBeans (would be available this week) and play with it. I am pretty sure you will like the fact that netbeans projects are now ant-driven.

By the way, impossible to know what they are doing at Google. :-(

Comments

• Vincent,

  There is a JDK 5.0 early release for Tiger that is available through Apple's (pay) dev program.

  Eric

  Posted by: erictfree on December 14, 2004 at 09:04 AM

• People *should* complain and whinge about not getting 5.0.

  After all, as they say "the squeaky wheel gets the grease".

  How will Apple know if people want this or not? If noone complains, they would be justified putting their efforts into something else, that people actually want badly.

  However, it does no good to complain about this in the java community. Those of us who use OSX are probably already aware of the issue. If you want your complaining to count, you need to do it to Apple, not Sun. It's Apple's job to port it, not Sun's!

  That said...

  Having it on a 'pay to view' basis is completely naff. Its a freaking developer tool, so us freaks that are developers should be able to use it!! If Apple wants more developers, they should treat us with more respect than that.

  "Okay", you say, "so why not take your own advice, and complain to Apple?"

  Well... since I think that Java 5.0 is the spawn of the devil, I'm quite happy to wait. And I'm not convinced that I need to upgrade to OSX 10.4 either anyway. (Says the one that was still using 95/98 until the start of this year)

  "So why would Apple care?" You might say. "They're not going to make money from you, you techno-sponge."

  To which I would reply that they may not take much money from me, but if they treat me (and other developers) nicely, they stand to make money because of me.

  Posted by: rickcarson on December 14, 2004 at 11:38 PM

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