Occasional Thoughts

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

I do not want to comment on the others but on his suggestion to add different prefixes to variables:

• f for fields
• a for arguments
• no prefix for local variables

His example that should prove in his opinion that this is better readable is:

public boolean equals (Object aOther)
{
  if (! (aOther instanceof Range)) return false;
  Range other = (Range) aOther;
  return fStart.equals(other.fStart) && fEnd.equals(other.fEnd);
}

Well I couldn't disagree more with him:

However it is also a fact that Groovy became very popular in a very short time and I find it very astonishing that Sun seems to ignore it. It's even more astonishing since Groovy as way closer to Java than any other of the scripting languages and therefore more natural to Java programmers. This makes Groovy an ideal choice for the fluid glue layer in projects, where most developers are Java experts with little knowledge of other scripting languages.

Just some observations from JAX 2008, the great conference for enterprise Java developers on their choice of operating systems...

About 40% of presenters of talks I attended used Apple notebooks. I haven't noticed that anyone used Linux as choice for his operating system. There was also a very high amount of Apple users among the 2000 attendees. Around 10% used Apple systems. In contrast I have just seen a couple of people running Linux.

I was pretty surprised by this. I would have expected that there would be much more Java developers using Linux. Especially since there is still no Java 6 for Mac OS X is available since a few days and after I've read this posting in the blog of Vladimir Dobriakov, where he talks about his experiences with Mac OS X and his switch back to Linux.

But maybe a lot of the attendees use Linux just on their workstations and not on their laptops.

...and brought many new ideas home. JAX 2008 was a great event, but also very exhausting. There were a total of 211 sessions from which to choose from starting at 08:30 in the morning with session until the late evening.

Main themes as I have collected them where:

• Dynamic Languages
• Spring
• SOA
• Eclipse
• Architectures
• Web frameworks and RIAs
• Complexity of the classic JEE offers. I would even say that I heard of a severe crisis of JEE and I doubt that a radically simplified EJB 3.1 will change peoples mind on that.

I used FreeMind to collect notes and here are the unedited notes I took during some of the sessions:

General Notes abut JAX 2008

In general JAX 2008 had more than 2000 participants - a record in the history of this conference. There where 211 sessions, 22 workshops and 10 short talks presented by 178 speakers. In my opinion JAX 2009 should rather try to reduce the amount of sessions and given the presenters more time. Most talks had to rush through the content as the time was limited to an hour and there was so much to say.