Sneak Peak at Java's New Makeover

SadatChowdhury writes "Aside from templates as already reported in a past slashdot article , a little snooping around revealed the details of the following newly revealed features in the upcoming release of Java 1.5 (codenamed: Tiger) : Autoboxing , Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports . Must read for Java fans." In related news: jdkane writes "Sun Microsystems delays a much-anticipated Java specification by three months to comply with guidelines designed to keep Web services interoperable. Says Ralph Galantine, group marketing manager for Java Web services at Sun: "We thought that this change was important for the industry, so that there was no conflict between J2EE 1.4 and the WS-I, "We thought it was worth taking out to the summer." It's very refreshing to hear that a big software company is looking out for the industry, instead of just their own."

Comments

Java#

[barnsleyBigUn]

Most of the new language features are copying or implementing similar to the C# features Sun has persistently decryed!

Autoboxing ... same as boxing in C#

the for-iterator [for(Sting s: Collection)] statement is actually "nicer" (in that intent is clearer from the code) in C# [foreach(String s in Collection)]

Generics ... well both languages have/will have generics now ... still not 100% convinced but prefer to have them than not to have them ;-)

Enumerations ... C# has them same as C/Pascal, now suddenly Java is getting them (are they going to revisit the library and clean up a lot of their class constants into enums now??)

I propose they go full how and add the extremely powerful attributes from C# as well ... being able to add custom metadata to any method/property, for example how to serialise to XML correctly, is great!!

In short ... competition is great for Java!!!

Re:Autoboxing

[zero_offset]

Seriously, with a language like C you can feel like you actually know ALL the rules, and it makes you feel safe. With the beasts that are VB.net/VB6 and C#, and the one that Java is becoming, you always have that lingering "What If" in the back of your head.

I agree with you fully when it comes to VB and Java, but C# does not deserve to be lumped into this category. Everybody knows VB wasn't really "designed", it just sort of "happened" over the years. Java had a lot more design work behind it, but it still suffers from weird evolutionary lumps that always "feel wrong" when you're using it. However, C# went through a very long and intensive design period, with more well-defined goals than Java (the set-top-box language), and I believe with a LOT more R&D-phase input from the real world (as anybody who participated in Don Box's .NET listserv discussions can tell you).

C# is a lot like C in that the language itself is limited and well-defined, although not to the extreme basics of a 12-keyword universe like C, owing primarily to the additional keyword overhead needed to express certain modern concepts, many (most?) of which are OOP-related. In that sense it's a little like C++.

For an experienced programmer, the trick is to first understand the .NET class hierarchy (hint: avoid books that harp too heavily on web services buzzwords; web services are just a few pieces of the very large .NET puzzle). Next, understand the C# language on it's own. Most of the books out there seek to tackle both of them simultaneously, and that's a big hinderance to learning, and probably what causes people to make statements like that made by vandel405, above.

Don't judge the subject matter by the quality of instruction...