Prime Mover of Java's Port to Linux Interviewed

jg21 writes "After Java 5, what will become of Calvin Austin now that he's lead engineer - and spec lead - in charge of J2SE on Linux? This interview shows him to be Sun's most personable developer asset after James Gosling. (Gosling BTW, who famously uses Mac OS rather than a PC, has a Linux box and uses the X support on OS X to run Java 5.) Asked what feature in the new Java edition he considered coolest of all, Austin without hesitation replied "Metadata" - the spec lead for that particular feature, Austin's former colleague at Sun Joshua Bloch, was headhunted recently by Google. Now Java, Linux, and Google would be quite a combo. Maybe that's what's fueling all the recent speculation that a Google browser would probably be a browser, feed reader, blog tool, desktop search, online search, gmail, news reader, photo editing, and online photo publishing all rolled into one."

Comments

Java on Linux -- Ugly step child...

[Spoing]

OK, that's too harsh. Maybe these issues are gone with 1.5?

Complaints;

1. Must jump through hoops to at sun.com and add on other supporting tools as a seperate step to get it to work in the browser and at the shell prompt.
2. Manual dinking with scripts to run java apps; many requiring specific options. Should be seamless.
3. Version conflicts; one app requires 1.3.x, another 1.4. Java doesn't deal with the version dependencies automatically.

While these are minor annoyances, they prevent me from relying on Java being there on client systems or other servers, so I don't even put Java on unless it is necessary.

Re:Java on Linux -- Ugly step child...

[LeninZhiv]

In my experience 99 out of 100 apps are run with $ java -jar appname.jar from the command line, or else they come with an installer that sets up a launch script for you. It's not any more complicated than programs written in any other language: CLASSPATH is annoying when it doesn't 'just work' but so is libfoo.so. And actually many of the programs in /usr/bin are scripts that launch the binary with lots of command line flags and environment variables needing to be set.

I agree that some of the defaults on the command line are questionable decisions (requiring -source 1.4 instead of the other way round, -ea being off by default), but these are hidden from the end user in distributed applications.

Or to put it more succinctly: which is quicker to install, Apache or Tomcat?

having trouble with jdk 1.5 generics

[zaqattack911]

As I'm just twiddling by thumbs waiting for the new Resin jsp/servlet/j2ee server to be jdk 1.5 approved (officially). I decided to try out generics on my own.

The problem is with Arrays.. you know old fashioned String[] bob = new String[13];

For testing purposed I created my own MyQueue class which supports generics:

public class MyQueue { ... }

Now, I need to use something to contain my queue elements, so naturally I want an array like:

protected Element[] myelements;

However as soon as I try and do this in my constructor: myelements = new Element[size]; I get a compile-time error claiming I can't use generics and arrays this way.

So I'm forced to either use Object[] myelements and cast everything back to (Element) when I return things, or I can use Element[] myelements, but in the constructor I need to initialize it like this: myelements (Element[]) new Object[size];

Fucking retarted.. not to mention I need to javac with the -Xlint to avoid all the warnings about casting in this way. Just to double check I wanted to see how they impletement ArrayList in java 1.5 and sure enough they were doing it the same way I was... with all the warnings and everything.

WHY?! Yes I realise I could use an ArrayList to store my queue data, but I kinda want to use lower level stuff like an array, the way java.lang api is.