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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
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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
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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.
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.
> 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.
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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.