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Java 7 Roundup (Mar 20th)

20 Mar 2007

This is a weekly update on new Java 7 information. All current and previous information is maintained on my Java 7 page.

Java 7 Discussion

One interesting generic item was a post from Neil Bartlett on a James Gosling Q&A, which mentioned that Gosling seems to be a fan of the BGGA closure proposal. There’s some other interesting tidbits in these notes, too, so check them out.

Java Modules (JSR 277, 294)

The Java modularity discussion continues to stay active. Glyn Normington posted some notes on the historical background of Java modularity at IBM and whether Java should have included modularity features from the beginning.

As a backdrop for JSR 277 and 294 which are slated for Java 7, JSR 291 (which is OSGi R4.1) has been making it’s way through the JCP process, with some controversy. It passed it’s final review ballot but had some no votes (from Google, JBoss, Sun, and Hani) and some yes votes with concerns, mostly over the “pass-through” nature of the JSR. I think OSGi is great and I’m definitely glad it’s gained the popularity it has, although I’m not sure that I understand why it even needs to be a JSR. Neil Bartlett has posted a plea for passing it to the dissenters and he addresses that question to some degree.

I’d also like to make a quick plug for a recent EclipseCon presentation by some great guys at BEA (my employer) on the experiences implementing the BEA mSA backplane. mSA stands for micro Services Architecture and encapsulates a move towards an OSGi-based backplane at BEA. At the end of the presentation, they address their feelings towards JSR 277. Lots of great real-world experience contained in this talk.

More info: JSR 277, JSR 294

Swing (JSR 295, 296)

There were a couple good posts on Swing this week from Danno Ferrin on data binding with Groovy and from Dean Iverson on the future of Swing apps.

More info: JSR 295, JSR 296

JMX 2.0 (JSR 255)

Daniel Fuchs posted on how to search for MBeans of a certain type and the need for this functionality in JMX 2.0.

More info: JSR 255

Annotations on Java Types (JSR 308)

There was an interesting post from Rémi Forax on whether type annotation syntax should list annotations before the type (as proposed) or after the type. I think both syntaxes are a little uncomfortable, but the proposed JSR 308 syntax seems more consistent with other annotation syntaxes, as they all appear before the item being annotated.

More info: JSR 308

Closures

Closures continue to be a hot topic out on the web. Stephen Colebourne released v0.4 of the FCM proposal with some additions and modifications based on web feedback. Thomas Hawtin posted his thoughts on what he’s looking for in Java 7 closures. Joe Walker posted some BGGA closure examples that might be helpful in understanding the BGGA proposal.

And if you’d like to get familiar with the various closure syntax proposals, check out a homework assignment at San Jose State… :)

More info: Closures

Reification of Generic Types

Peter von der Ahé posted some comments on the compiler-dev mailing regarding the feasibility of implementing reified generics in Java 7.

More info: Reified generics

Miscellaneous Ideas

Finally, I saw a couple posts about some miscellaneous ideas for Java 7. Alexander Schunk posted on structs and dynamic arrays, neither of which seems worth the effort to me. And Neal Gafter posted on the need for a weak identity hash map in Java 7, coming out of experience with Bob Lee’s Guice framework.