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Draft Review of Java 7 "Measures and Units"

Posted by kdawson on from the comment-quick dept.

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."

3 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. getting tired of Java ... by boxlight · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've spent most of the last 10 years building desktop and web applications with Java: AWT, Swing, JSP, Struts, J2EE, EJBs, and on and on.

    Through all those years I've had to fight perceptions of Java being hard to distribute, slow, difficult, insecure, and over-engineered. I've done pretty well in the battle, and produced some pretty nice products.

    Maybe I'm having a bit of a mid-life crisis, and I'm wondering where to go from here. I'm looking at alternatives for development: AJAX, Ruby, PHP, and Adobe AIR. But nothing out there (outside of the Microsoft world) does everything that Java does as well -- but Java just doesn't do GUI too well. Although GWT is pretty cool. And I've always thought Applets were underrated and under-utilized.

    The point of this rant? Java 7 doesn't excite me in the least. Me and everyone I know are firmly planted in Java 5 (or is it 1.5? I always forget) and we don't appear to be moving to Java 6 (1.6?) -- so why should we care about Java 7 (1.7?).

    Anyway, that's my rant. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

    1. Re:getting tired of Java ... by alyawn · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree about the features of Java 6 & 7. I code to Java 5 but run in the latest and greatest VM because they continue to make performance enhancements there.

      As for GUI development, I believe that we will see some progress made there. Right now, there is some good competition going on between Swing, SWT, and other toolkits. And now, QT just came out with QT Jambi which looks really cool. The bottom line is that eventually, one of these toolkits will emerge and become the defacto toolkit. Remember, cross platform UI is a hard problem to solve. They'll figure it our eventually. Or, you may get tired enough and write one yourself :)

  2. Re:More Java growth? by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A little detail: "Java" is both a platform and a language. C# is just a language, one of several that runs on the .NET platform. (Microsoft doesn't like the word "platform", but it's the only one that fits.) So when you're analyzing market share, you need to compare Java with .NET, not with C#.

    The figures you quote show .NET doing pretty good, though still lagging way behind Java. One little improvement in the Java language is not going to spell the "death nell" for the .NET platform. That would be true even if .NET didn't have the backing of the biggest software company on the planet.

    What is bad news for .NET is the fact that Sun seems to be capturing a lot of developer mind share with its Java Community Process, which is where this proposal comes from, along with a lot of other good stuff, including JSR 166, which originated outside Sun, and has successfully added a major improvement in concurrency to the Java platform.

    The JCP won't spell the "death knell" to C# or .NET either, not as long as they have MS's backing — and are essential tools on Windows. But it will certainly help Java hold onto its lead.