Robert Engels wrote:
To set the record straight, I think the Lucene product and community are
fantastic. Period.
Ditto.
[snip]
After almost 2 years I now back the move. Why? Several reasons:
1. Sun is very slow, if at all to fix bugs in 1.4 (of which there are many).
For example, the current problems in Lucene regarding ThreadLocals. Although
this is not a bug per se, it is probably not intuitive or desired behavior.
The Lucene developers have been forced to both diagnose and create
workarounds "problems" already fixed in 1.5. The licensing of Java does not
allow for the easy fix bugs by non-Sun developers.
2. The type safe collections are far more efficient to program/debug with.
3. The standardized concurrent facilities can be of great benefit to
multithreaded programs.
4. It is what students graduating from college understand and use.
5. It is what the currently available books explain and use.
For my money (2) is the most important reason for moving to 1.5. My
early years (!) involved a lot of work with programming languages and
finally having type-safe collections and the syntactic conventions that
go along with those immediately struck me as a good step forward. That
first impression was borne out when I converted some of my java code to
use the 1.5 type-safe constructs. Not only was the code shorter and
more understandable (aka more maintainable) but it brought to light some
bugs that had lain their dormant for quite a while.
Lucene is well-tested and stable and written by better people better at
writing Java than me so it's unlikely that there'll be any bugs like
that lurking in dark corners. On the other hand, new code stands a
better chance of being bug free precisely because of the improvements in
the language and the improved type-safety.
(3) comes second for me though -- I'm a big fan of Doug Lea's
util.concurrent classes and having them well integrated in Java 1.5
makes them even better, but that's the operating system personality talking.
jch
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