That’s One Gallopin’ Mustang, Sun!
October 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Unlike some of my more austere colleagues, I find what Sun is doing with the new releases of Java to be mostly good, and certainly exciting. Personally, I have felt this way since the Java 5 release. In my coding work these days, I use nearly all the features that release gave us. Generics, enums, annotations, varargs, printf(), the new for-loop—pretty much everything. I like the syntactic sugar and the convenience they bring, so I use them wherever I can.
We can all debate about whether these additions were too little, too late. However, as I have pointed out before, I really don’t think it’s too late for Java in the way Bruce Tate (of “Beyond Java” fame) and the legions of Ruby enthusiasts do. The changes might be too little, but Sun has a bunch of new stuff in store for Java 6, code-named Mustang, that’s got me wondering whether I should switch over even before its final release (currently set for October). Mustang also has one peculiar addition, which I’ll discuss shortly.
An improvement that will be of interest to many readers is the incorporation of a bunch of XML and Web services technology from Java EE, combined with some annotation magic. You now can define a function and, with the single @WebService annotation, convert it into a Web service. (And if you want to test it on the spot without uploading your classes to the corporate Web server, you can use the built-in, barebones HTTP server.) It’s pretty much that simple: An annotation and a pair of import statements are also needed.
Another feature, which will gladden the hearts of the scripting enthusiasts budding within us all, is the addition of a new bytecode, invokedynamic, that makes scripting engines embedded into Java much more efficient. The bytecode facilitates the execution of methods in the absence of type information. (Essentially, it permits the code to do non-Java things. While this addition is being done strictly to support embedding languages that use duck typing, one has to wonder whether this is not laying the groundwork for more scriptinglike Java syntax in the future.)
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