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:New and Improved for()!

[Twylite]

I am in awe of the new for() statement. Java was designed to be logical and readable, but unfortunately for (String s : c) means nothing to most developers.

The JCP is a classic case of committee design: everyone has their own ideas based on their experience, and doesn't really understand the purpose or path of the Java language. Most JCP suggestions are calls for Java to look more like C++ or Python.

Yuck.

[crmartin]

It's someone or others' law that all programming languages eventually grow too many features to remember. (Hell, it might even be my law.) So, let's see -- we're getting:

• templates from C++;
• a new style of emun that does everything the Pascal enum does with a syntax that looks like a C enum except that it can have methods, AND MORE;
• a whole new foreach syntax that has the stellar advantage that the syntax doesn't resemble anything on God's green earth except Smalltalk, which is a pure prefix language like Lisp instead of an algol block language like C, C++, Java, C-hash, pascal or Ada (where the other features come from);
• generics using the template model from C++, which was a horrible hack on top of C++ because it was hard to make a backward compatible syntax (so instead we got ANOTHER class of macro to add to the #define) when C++ was a horrible hack on top of C so that at least C++ could compile C programs (except now it can't);
• a grammar that is going to be about LL(497) (doesn't anyone remember how ugly parsing C++ got to do templates, and how long it was before it worked?);
• and a whole wonderful new term ("autoboxing") for the notion that primitive types and class types ought to both have all the properties of types.

I know I'm probably just getting old, but Jesus!, why do we need to repeat all the mistakes of the past?