Java News Brief (JNB): Clojure---Functional Programming for the JVM
The March Issue of the OCI Java News Brief (JNB) is out.
Since I last reported on JNB in December, three JNB articles have appeared:
- Eric Burke—A Simple Android App and a Threading Bug
- Dan Lewis—Google Collections, Part 2
- Mark Volkmann—Clojure - Functional Programming for the JVM
Mark's article, just out, gives a comprehensive coverage of the Clojure programming language. (It prints out to 60 pages.) According to Mark:
Mark Volkmann: Here are some key questions to ask yourself that will help in deciding whether you should give Clojure a try...
- Are you looking for a way to make concurrent programming easier?
- Are open to branching outside the world of object-oriented programming to try functional programming?
- Is it important for the applications you write to run on the JVM in order to take advantage of existing Java libraries, portability and other benefits?
- Do you prefer dynamically-typed languages over statically-typed ones?
- Do you find the minimal, consistent syntax of Lisp dialects appealing?
If you answered "yes" some of these questions then you should consider Clojure for your next programming language.
Another Month, Another Messaging Stack Goes Open Source...
... for those keeping track, here are the previous ones:
- Everybody Is Open Sourcing His Messaging Software
- Etch: A New Open Source Messaging Protocol From Cisco
- A Messaging Standard Burst Onto The Scene
And now (this is not new news, but Adam and Ciju haven't heard of it, and so) this:
Dionysios G. Synodinos for InfoQ: Adobe has announced plans to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) specification, which is designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between Adobe Flash Platform technologies. This move that has followed the opening of the AMF spec has been received with varying degrees of enthusiasm from the RIA community.
And it
Neal Gafter: Block Expressions For Java
(Via The Java Posse Google Group (Via Twitter))
Neal Gafter: A parenthesized expression can now contain additional statements, for example declarations of temporary local variables to avoid recomputing a value used only within the expression. This feature is especially useful in machine-generated code.
A simple example:
double pi2 = (double pi = Math.PI ; pi*pi);
This is comparable to the equivalent JavaFX Script:
var pi2 = {var pi = Math.PI; pi*pi};
The proposal sounds like it should be eligible for Project Coin.
But will the Java community accept language proposals from a Microsoft employee (where Neal now works.)?
Oh, wait. Java did it once already: auto-boxing, annotations, and enums.
JavaFX 1.1 Released: Still No Linux Version
Sun released JavaFX 1.1 two days ago. This release included the JavaFX Mobile platform. Sony Ericson, LG Electronics, Orange, Sprint, Cynergy and MobiTV are listed as partners.
Josh Marinacci: JavaFX 1.1 has just been released with full mobile support. Several partners have also just announced their support for JavaFX, including LG and Sony Ericsson. You can get the new version of JavaFX and read about the partners at JavaFX.com.
Windows and Mac are still the only supported platforms for JavaFX 1.1. And some of the the work around that I blogged about here, here, and here for making JavaFX 1.0 work on Linux no longer works with JavaFX 1.1.
Since most of the improvements are in the JavaFX Mobile area, and that part is not even available on the Mac, Linux users probably won't see too much difference even if JavaFX 1.1 could be made to work on Linux. So I would wait for an official Linux release the way Mac users wait for the official release of the JDK from Apple.
If you can live with only the command line tools, you can download the Mac version of the NetBeans 6.5 module and unzip it (It's a zip formatted file). You can find a javafx-sdk subdirectory underneath the netbeans directory. Again, only the portion of the JavaFX 1.1 SDK that doesn't depend on any native libraries works.