Tag: java

In a recent interview with James Gosling at Sun’s World Wide Education and Research Conference in New York, Gosling was asked whether he considers the Java language under threat from any of the new-comer languages. Gosling replied that languages like PHP and Ruby (on Rails) are powerful at what they are designed to do, namely generate web pages, but are less suitable for implementing large enterprise systems.

Also of interest, C# was considered a threat to Java but no longer : “they’re hopelessly focused on one platform”.

If there is one solid reason to look at the Netbeans 5.0 release, then all the hype I have been hearing is defintely centered around the new GUI builder called Matisse which is included in 5.0.

Matisse has been referred to as the VisualBasic style GUI builder for Java – at long last we have a simple and effective way of being able to build GUI layouts in a simple drag and drop way. Dick Wall (one of the presenters on The JavaPosse podcast), gives an overview in this article on the developer.com website.

The Java language/platform/JVM has evolved considerably over the last 10 years. OnJava.com have an interesting article summarizing what the Java platform is today.

Although SE 6.0 is not a major release with significant language syntax changes as SE 5.0 was, there are still some interesting enhancements that will be included in the 6.0 release. DevX.com has an article giving an overview of each of these enhancements.

Included changes:

• Compiler API – to allow developers to be able to programatically compile source code. Interesting for code generation projects.
• Memory leak and detection information, with improved stack trace for java.lan.OutOfMemory errors.
• JDesktop Integration Components (JDIC) project. This API gives Java applications access to native operating system features on the desktop, such as the browser, email editor, file-type associations, the system tray, application launching, and printing.