This is a weekly update on new Java 7 information. All current and previous information is maintained on my Java 7 page. This update is a bit late and thus a bit bigger than usual. Enjoy the tasty Java 7 goodness.
One post getting some attention this week is Alex Blewitt’s thought-provoking critique of the JCP and the JSR process. I include the link here as it talks quite a bit about the future evolution of Java, including Java 7. Stephen Colebourne has a post up himself with some very relevant and pointed questions about the JCP.
Modularity
I think I mentioned this in the last roundup, but [This is a weekly update on new Java 7 information. All current and previous information is maintained on my Java 7 page. This update is a bit late and thus a bit bigger than usual. Enjoy the tasty Java 7 goodness.
One post getting some attention this week is Alex Blewitt’s thought-provoking critique of the JCP and the JSR process. I include the link here as it talks quite a bit about the future evolution of Java, including Java 7. Stephen Colebourne has a post up himself with some very relevant and pointed questions about the JCP.
Modularity
I think I mentioned this in the last roundup, but](http://blogs.sun.com/andreas/entry/edr_of_jsr_294_superpackages) the JSR 294 Early Draft Review is available. The only significant review of it I’ve seen is the very thorough review by Peter Kriens coming from the OSGi perspective. Definitely worth a read.
Also, Eugene Kuleshov looked at the class attributes introduced with JSR 294 for superpackages and prototyped some early support in ASM (the bytecode manipulation framework).
More info: JSR 294
Libraries
The main topics on the JSR 310 mailing list lately have been how to best integrate JSR 310 date/time concepts with databases (via JDBC) and XML. I’ve spent significant amounts of time working with both aspects, particularly in dealing with the Bermuda triangle of timezones, databases, and Date/Calendar, so I’m not surprised that there are lots of challenges.
More info: JSR 310
Swing
There was a writeup this week on various binding techniques for Swing ultimately advocating and providing examples with the Bean Binding JSR 295.
More info: JSR 295
Language Proposals
In the land of closures, Neal has provided an update to his closures prototype. This version “allows a closure to access mutated local variables from an enclosing scope”. I couldn’t possibly paraphrase that and do it justice.
In a follow to a JavaPosse episode where tuples were discussed, Bruce Chapman looked at how to use the closures prototype to provide multiple return values.
In the same entry as the updated closures prototype, Neal laid out some more background on the extension methods proposal, which lets you use static imports to let you call methods on objects that really exist as static methods elsewhere as a way to graft utility methods into a class after it’s published. There has been quite a bit of discussion on this out in the blogosphere:
I must say that from my perspective, I don’t find it particularly compelling. I understand that it would address the “need to extend but can’t due to backwards compatibility issue”, but that as a general issue isn’t something I worry much about. I gather one of the motivations is likely to allow us to retrofit closure methods into the collection library, which might be important enough to do although I’m still on the fence even there. I’m interested in seeing more examples and thinking about it some more (as if I have any say in the matter).
More info: Closures, Extension Methods
JVM
This week Frank Cohen provided an update on JSR 292 expert group progress. Sounds like a promising and interesting JSR to watch as more concrete goals are formed.
More info: invokedynamic