Slashdot Mirror
Draft Review of Java 7 "Measures and Units"
Jean-Marie Dautelle writes to inform us that the public review period ends on July 8 for JSR-275, "Measures and Units" Early Draft. The JSR-275 will be a major enhancement for Java 7 by providing "strong" typing (through class parameterization) and easy internationalization of Java programs, preventing conversion errors. The latest version 0.8 is available as a PDF. The reference implementation is provided by the JScience project under a BSD license."
Rule #2 - When making a point, do not discredit yourself
Website Hosting
Its a one of the several neat ideas being lifted from the Fortress language.
;)
For the unitiated, Guy Steele (of Scheme fame) is building a new language for scientific computing called Fortress. It has some nice ideas that really should have been there by now. The language would have saved countless headaches in not just scientific but probably all mainstream software development projects.
Of course, its just one of the pet projects in SUN Labs
- mritunjai
Lets see what jobs are actually out there:
-
Dice
- C#: 7303 (or 5054 if you take out all the incorrect matches on C)
- Java: 16803
-
Monster (last 10 days since it limits to 5k)
- C#: 1911
- Java: 3760
That is without comparing salaries which are on average higher for Java developers.Just goes to show how out of touch HR really is.
Struts 1.x == old and busted, Struts 2.x == gaining ground rather quickly. It is worth checking out if you haven't done so. It has AJAX support built-in, the configuration is a heck of a lot easier than before and there is a plug-in interface to help roll-out new functionality or integration with other libraries (Spring, SiteMesh, GWT, and a bunch more already).
:).
You are definitely right that there are too many frameworks
You want the honest answer or the sugarcoated one?
Sugar: JScience is getting attention now because Sun is standardizing it through the JCP.
Honest: Because you've been living in Microsoft la-la land? JScience has been around in the form of the J.A.D.E. library for at least 5 or 6 years; probably longer. Jean-Marie has worked diligently over the years to make sure that Java has had top-notch support for scientific programming. The fact that he's getting recognition by the JCP members is nothing short of splendid. He deserves every bit of it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Java 6 and Java 7 are relatively minor changes. As far as I can tell, the issue is that Sun can't deal with having more than one number in versions. When they revised the Java language, they didn't change the 1 to a 2; they added an extra 2 elsewhere in the name. Then when they wanted to do it again, they didn't know what to change, so they initially left everything the same, and then they discarded all of the stuck numbers. This means that they don't have a way to show the difference between adding a few library features and changing big important things. The difference between 5, 6, and 7 is much like the difference between 1.4.0, 1.4.1, and 1.4.2, and it's not worth upgrading unless you happen to care particularly about a new feature.
I'm a Java guy too, but built a series of large-company financial webapps using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. I started when RoR was at a 0.1 release version (it's now almost 2.0). I found RoR to be an excellent tool for a quick, single webapp. We ended up writing 4 apps, though, and RoR is showing its limitations.
1. Lack of Talent. I had extreme difficulty finding qualified developers willing to work in Ruby fulltime. Few people had RoR experience, but most experience software developers from C++/Java/C# backgrounds were hesitant to make the leap to Ruby for fear it would hurt their resume. The experienced RoR folks also seem to have a very inflated sense of worth, which is driven by market scarcity.
2. Stability Problems. We've upgraded across several point RoR releases. Every time it shuts down productive work for 2 days. Yet needed features are in the updates, so we've upgraded. Java is far more stable and backwards compatible. Most recently we ran into a many-to-many ActiveRecord bug in the new code (the old approach is deprecated) that is "critical" in the RoR database but unresolved after 40+ days. You can't have basic ORM logic broken for business apps.
3. Multiple Applications. RoR and Capistrano (a great tool) are built for a single webapp. If you have multiple webapps that need deployment using shared packages (business objects), Capistrano can't get the job done (Ant can). If you need to share common business objects across multiple apps, it requires a symlink hack for RoR (whereas Ant makes it trivial to package mulitple tarballs from one project directory). If you need separate databases for one application (accounting data, credit card data, regular data, etc) then Java is ready to roll whereas RoR needs some code written to handle multiple databases easily.
All this to say we are rewriting all of our RoR webapps to use Java (POJOs with Struts 2.0).
> Java 6 and Java 7 are relatively minor changes.
Language-wise Java 1.6 doesn't include any changes; check out the docs for the -source option for javac.
The Army reading list
The JSR that I'm excited about;
- JSR 294 Improved Modularity Support (superpackages); so we can define the API that is public for a library, so the user doesn't have to see all the public functions.
- JSR 296 Swing Application Framework; which helps us build better Swing GUIs faster in a more standard way.
- JSR 295 Beans Binding and JSR 303 Beans Validation
I was really excited about that Consumer JRE / Java Kernel, which was suppose to minimize the size of the JRE so you could bundle a 5mb JRE for a normal Swing Application, but they decided on pushing that to Java 6! so it's arriving as a patch late this year. It will probably include a very nice looking look&feel as well as GUI drawing optimizations using DirectX on Windows.. pretty cool.
We can also hope for Closures, which would make our GUI code a lot neater.. My company and everyone that I know (except Apple) have moved to Java 6 - and the IDEs such as Eclipse and new technologies like Open-Terracotta are making me love Java! Especially cause we are developing applications / algorithms that run on many different platform.. Java is really the only way cause its fast enough and rock solid.
Well, Eclipse is a major step in the right direction, despite its shortcomings (the structure of the SWT library and its limitations in comparision w/ Swing, its bulk, etc.).
When you program Eclipse RCP applications, you don't just spend less time fudging around w/ GUI widgets and more time plugging in large chunks of functionality provided to you (for free) in the framework. Tasks that would have taken me months alone have been shortened up to a matter of weeks...
I think this is about the most interesting period for Java GUI there has been with work like the Cosumer JRE and Java FX
Still if you fancy looking at something new Scala looks quite interesting.
It's pretty easy to do Units/Dimensional Analysis in the D programming language:
physical.d
The example is by Oskar Linde.
They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is.
I'm no economist, but this statement confuses me. You're really saying that it was somehow better when someone could say "one dollar equals
Money is meaningless outside of the context of exchanging it for stuff you want. As long as a dollar can be exchanged for things people want, it has value. The minute it doesn't, it's worthless. That's the only reference point that matters. $1 = x% of stuff I want.
AccountKiller