Kev’s Blog – Page 326 – Kev's Development Toolbox

November 13, 2006

It’s official – Sun picks GPL for Open Sourcing Java

Sun has confirmed that it is to use the GPL Open Source license to open source Java SE. Although this is considered the most restrictive of the open source licenses (mainly because it forces derivitive works to also use the same license), this does allow Java to be more Linux friendly (which itself is mainly licensed under the GPL). Sun is using a clause in the license however that allows any applications developed using Java (since these are not derivitives of the Java product itself) to be licensed how the developer choses.

More details in this article on news.com.

November 10, 2006

PS3 ships tomorrow (Saturday) in Japan – 1.10 update already planned for download same day

Saturday is the big day for Japan as consumers will be able to buy the much awaited PS3 from Sony. Sony have also annouced that a 1.10 OS upgrade will also be available for download on the same day, which together with a 3.0 upgrade for the PSP which presumably adds support for connectivity between the PS3 and the PSP.

Potential consumers are being discouraged from lining up outside stores, since large public gatherings in Japan are seen as a public nuisanse.

November 10, 2006

Grails 0.3 – additional Hibernate mapping and Entity simplifications added

Grails 0.3 has been released and it now includes support for Hibernate’s n:m mapping support (although in reality this is nearly always better if mapped as n:1 and 1:m with an association table in the middle – this was possible in previous versions of Grails anyway), plus additional simplification for developing your Entities.

Normally you would generate a new Entity using ‘grails generate-domain-class’ which would put in the necessary ‘equals()’, ‘hashcode()’ and ‘toString()’ methods, but these are no longer needed (unless you need to override them) as they are generated for you at runtime. This leads to very concise Entity classes.

November 10, 2006

java.net – ‘Nuances of the Java 5.0 for-each loop’

If you’re currently developing on or about to move to SE 5, this article on java.net gives some useful info and tips on how to best use the new ‘for each’ loop.