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Coordinating the Evolution of Java


Java Watch

By Allen Holub
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November 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 2)
It’s interesting that the release of Java 5, with all of its new language extensions and library updates, seems to have had little or no impact on the Java world. Though I’m sure that some shops have embraced the new version of the language wholeheartedly, most programmers are simply ignoring the new language. Just look through any of the Java magazines, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a generic class or an example of the new loop syntax outside of an article that’s describing how that feature works.

Part of the problem is the huge teetering edifice of open source. One side effect of 100 programmers working on the same project with little or no real coordination is that none of the contributors knows how the whole program works. Consequently, when it comes to something as significant as a major rewrite to bring a project in line with the current language spec, nobody has either the will or the knowledge to do it. The result is stasis. (Truth to tell, some of the open-source code is so bad that it would have to be discarded completely and rewritten from scratch.)

The nobody-understands-the-code problem isn’t limited to open-source projects, of course, but when our own code is based on one or more open-source frameworks that aren’t Java 5-compatible, the impetus to moving our own code to Java 5 is not exactly overwhelming.

Meanwhile, however, Sun has been diligently moving forward to a new Java release scheduled for early next year, and many of the new standards that will be incorporated into the language leverage these new features. Eventually, it will simply be impossible to ignore the new language, if for no other reason than the new versions of libraries that many of us use on a regular basis, such as EJB and JDBC, not only leverage new language features—primarily annotations and generics—but are also much easier to use as a consequence. That is, there will be a compelling argument—easier construction and maintenance—for making the move.




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