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

Re:Java 8

[EWIPlayer]

Take it from me, I work in HR at a Fortune 500 company, so I know a thing or two.

This AC is totally right. Every time I need a decision on which language I should use to implement a product, I always go straight to HR; preferably HR in fortune 500 company. Those folks really know their stuff!

As if what companies use has anything whatsoever to do with this paper... I agree Java sucks, but this has nothing to do with whether or not someone is "employable" after reading this paper - it has to do with a fairly smart group of folks trying to make Java a bit better for numerical work. (i.e. for the public sector, more often than not)

getting tired of Java ...

[boxlight]

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!

Re:getting tired of Java ...

[alyawn]

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 :)

Re:getting tired of Java ...

[cmburns69]

Version 1.7 will come out, and then you'll start moving to 1.6. When 1.8 comes out, then you can switch to 1.7. It seems like very few people actually use the most recent version. I suspect this is because new methods need to be researched, and community support for new features must be developed.

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.

Re:More Java growth?

[jgrahn]

Looks like the death-blow for c#?

Yes. A couple of classes for handling metres, kilograms and seconds is the killer application for Java. All other languages/operating environments will disappear overnight.

Re:Java 8

[Mr. Bad Example]

> Take it from me, I work in HR at a Fortune 500 company, so I know a thing or two.

HR? I'd be surprised if you know what color database has the most RAM.

Re:More Java growth?

[fm6]

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.