Genii Weblog

A tiger is coming

Thu 18 Mar 2004, 10:37 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
Tom Duff reprints an interesting article on "Tiger", the codename for Sun's new J2SE 1.5 (Java 2 SDK - Standard Edition 1.5.0).  I responded with my thoughts on the importance of the various new features, but I would be interested in seeing your responses, especially if you have more experience with Java than I do.

For the record, here are my comments, although you'll have to go read the article to read more about the details.  Do you agree or disagree with my comments?

<<
1) generics will not be as useful/used as the author thinks;
2) metadata will be nice, but not much more;
3) autoboxing will be big, very big;
4) enumerations with methods and fields will be awesome;
5) foreach will rapidly become ubiquitous;
6) varargs will be huge, if implemented well;
7) printf will be huge for C developers moving to Java ;
8) static import will be nice, but not heavily used;
9) and I haven't the faintest about the collections stuff. 

>>

Copyright © 2004 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


132.1. Stan Rogers
(03/19/2004 11:48 AM)

I'll go along with everything but the generics. Casting from [object] in a collection to a type is a tremendous pain in the rear -- and there's no type safety going into the collection either, so you can't assume the cast will work on the way out. That means type checking everywhere. Yes, there are already type-safe "collections", but they don't quite cover the gamut. Generics -- good beat; you can dance to it.


132.2. Ben Langhinrichs
(03/19/2004 11:51 AM)

I'll buy that, or dance to it, as the case may be.


132.3. Julian Robichaux
(03/21/2004 08:10 PM)

I think varargs will be cool. I always thought that the ability to write a function with variable length parameter support was just a slick thing feature of C.

Of course, I don't think I've written any Java methods that had to do any kind of tricks to work around the lack of varargs-type support before, but I'll feel better just knowing it's there if I need it.

Of course, if they're adding printf support, they kind of have to throw varargs in there with it.

- Julian


132.4. Ben Langhinrichs
(03/21/2004 08:22 PM)

It may well be that my reaction is colored by the fact that I am a C/C++ developer, so I see those features being added to Java as positives. That said, the varargs is cool, and you are right, somewhat a gimmee when printf is being implemented. Still, it might be enough to get me to use Java more. Maybe.