Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Howard Lovatt has a good summary of the various proposed approaches to include the ability to support closures in Java, including his own proposal as well.
Closures are supported in many other languages like Ruby, Python, Lisp and Perl, and allow the developer to define a block of code and refer to that block of code with a reference. This allows the reference to the block to be passed as a parameter and to be applied to other code, for example to all matching items within a loop.
This book was mentioned on the JavaPosse’s podcast this week – it’s a collection of sample Java SE and EE type questions that are commonly used in interviews for developer positions, and would be useful for both interviewers and interviewess as a good source of information.
The site it is hosted on is also worth a look as it is an interesting concept – Lulu.com is a community publisher site. You can upload your own book content to be published on the site either for free or for sale, and the site offers it either for download or can print one off copies for people to purchase.
After several months of development and beta testing, Microsoft have released the final version of IE 7. This is the first browser update from Microsoft since IE 6 almost 5 years ago, and also since Microsoft announced back in 2003 that they would not be developing any standalone (non Windows integrated) browsers in the future, but chosing to spend their time integrating the browser into the OS instead.
This latest release does not really offer any new features that what have alreadty been available in Firefox. IE7 seems to be more or a ‘catch up’ release to ensure that IE has ‘me too’ features, so that there is not a chance that it will be left behind in the attention that Firefox has been generating in the past couple of years.
If you’re interested in taking a look at Ruby and Ruby on Rails but haven’t yet downloaded the frameworks or development tools, then the Rails Live CD is an awesome idea to get you started quickly.
Rails Live CD is a bootable Linux distro that contains all the tools you’ll need to get you started, without you having to install or configure a thing. This is well worth a look if the only thing putting you off so far has been to download and install the tools.