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."

Comments

Neat idea

[mritunjai]

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 ;)

Re:Java 8

[xero314]

I work in HR at a Fortune 500 company Translation: "I have no idea what I am talking about"

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.

Re:i like this a lot

[AKAImBatman]

seriously, how come this is the first that i've heard of this kind of idea?

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. :)

Re:getting tired of Java ...

[tcopeland]

> 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.

Re:getting tired of Java ...

[onash]

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.