Tom Wheeler: NetBeans Platform
Tonight's St. Louis JUG meeting is a fun one. Tom Wheeler, the award winning member of the NetBeans community, was on hand to talk about the NetBeans Platform.
Tom is a very eloquent presenter. That, coupled with the fact that Tom has been using the NetBeans Platform for two years, made this presentation a valuable one. The presentation slides is available here. Here's one slide that will make you think:
Other tidbits from the meeting:
- JetBrains has generously offered IntelliJ IDEA licenses for the presenter and one lucky attendee.
- KForce, a local IT recruiting company, brought in delicious food, and also raffled off a pair St. Louis Cardinals tickets. They have several Java positions.
- In an informal survey, Jeff Brown asked about IDE usages. By show of hands, it seems that many people are using Eclipse, a smaller number are using IDEA, and a couple people are using NetBeans. Jeff then asked, "If Eclipse costs $450 a license and you can't see the source, would you still be using Eclipse?" One answered that if that is the case he would be using IDEA instead. Another asked back "Who's paying it?"
A Comment On GCJ (It May Not Be Dangerously Buggy!)
(I attempted to comment on Angsuman Chakraborty's blog entry GCJ is Dangerously Buggy, but the blog is not taking comments.)
I ran Angsuman's code (essentially "System.out.println(new java.util.Date());") with the up-to-date GCJ on Fedora Core 6 and it produced the correct result, not the wrong result as Angsuman claimed.
Can anyone else reproduce the claimed behavior?
No New Language Features In Java 7?
Elliotte Harold: As for new features in the language, most attendees were lukewarm at best, even when discussing sexy topics like closures. To the extent that the Java language wasn't meeting their needs, most attendees seemed to prefer learning a a new language entirely, such as Scala, rather than adding more features to the Java language. Fortunately for them, Neal Gafter predicted that there will be no new language features in Java 7. Closures and other such major changes will have to wait for Java 8.
The article has been out for 9 days. I made a mental note about this paragraph but did not get around to blog about it until now.
I don't know how realistic Neal's prediction will proven to be. But I do feel that the number of new language feature proposals for Java 7 is too many and the scopes too big to be all adequately designed and agreed upon in time for Java 7 (which is still scheduled for 2008 as far as I can tell) and absorbed by the millions of Java programmers.
That's why I asked 34 days ago:
Me: ... what are they going to do after Java 7? Add a macro system?
With many Java programmers I know still working with Java 4 (my current project included), whether a feature show up in Java 7 or Java 8 really doesn't matter that much, at least for the next three years, during which time we'd be lucky if we can advance to Java 6.
Save some of that stuff for later. Maybe we should create a fictitious "Java ∞" (or Java 3000) to which all language feature proposals are made and debated and designed and tested. And the real Java releases (Java 7, Java 8, etc.) will only pick a few well regarded features from "Java ∞".