Kev Jackson wrote:
1. I wish jikes would move up to 1.5; my life is spent waiting for
things to compile again.
I've skipped Java 1.5 for various reasons:
1 - the 'enhanced for loop' is just crap
2 - I've not needed generics, I actually have no need for one of the
major features of the language, maybe I could change all my code so
that the collections are aware of the type of data they contain, but
I'm used to the 'old' way and it's no bother [shrug]
How *anyone* does not need generics is beyond me. This is *huge* in my
book. The amount of silly double-checking I can avoid by knowing the
compiler has done this checking for me is immediately worthwhile. Being
able to type:
public void doIt( Map<String,Map<String,Collection<Bar>>> foo );
rather than:
public void doIt( Map foo );
along with a huge Javadoc comment to try to explain that the type is
reall 'Map<String,Map<String,Collection<Bar>>>' without assuming that
the readers even understand generic syntax is also immediately
worthwhile. Worse, I've seen entire collections of classes created
simply to wrap collections and give them strong types... [Yes, the data
structure above is contrived, but similar or even more complex
structures arise quickly and commonly enough.]
4 - annotations, these seem to be in place for EE/EJB development and
I'm using hibernate and spring. Sure I could use them to declare
interfaces etc, but I'm genuinely ok with the old way
I already have make heavy usage of annotations for JMX -- which is the
other big reason for Java 5: built-in support for JMX and JSR 160
(rather than the ugly mish-mash of generally proprietary JMX
communication protocols that proceeded this).
6 - Jikes doesn't support it, WebLogic doesn't support it (then
WebLogic barely supports Java)
This is a reason to stop using Jikes! Seriously if the tool holds you
back from the latest technology and there is an equally workable tool
out there, then stop using it. Jikes may be faster than javac, but
that's not the bottleneck on my productivity.
2. <> looks ugly in generics; it should stay in XML where it belongs.
Maybe that shows the price of copying c++ too slavishly (except I
still think they should haved stuck to bool instead of boolean)
This makes it more readable to more people. XML-isms (i.e. usage of
<tag>, xxx="yyy", and & for non-"and" operations) should stay in XML and
not in Java in my book, though.
--
Jess Holle
