NFJS: Expert Panel 2
August 8th, 2004 by Hen(RL: Ramnivas Laddad, TN: Ted Neward, DT: Dave Thomas, CJ: Christopher Judd, BG: Ben Galbraith, SH: Stuart Halloway)
(Hen: Usual disclaimer that my transcript may inadvertently contain crap)
Qn: 5.0, new bits. What’s not great?
RL: Generics has come late to the game. Hard to see if it will improve things, or just create more complications.
TN: Glad you said that.
DT: Java 1.5 is a ridiculous mess. 1.5 implementation is a dog’s dinner. Generics at best gets in the way, at worst creates a mess.
The solution should have been in 1.0. Autocasting.
The Metadata stuff is interesting; similar to templates in C++, people compete to get programs all in comments.
CJ: Asserts. Who is actually using them? (1 person in the audience it seems). [HEN: Point being that we’re not really even using one of the last ‘big new things’]
TN: Annotation hell. Too much in annotations. [Hen: Ted has a blog entry about annotations not being for configuration]. EJB3 is talking about how to override annotations.
SH: Aspects for annotations yet?
(unsure who. I recorded TH, so probably TN and not EH): Yes, there will be.
DT: Are you serious?!?
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BG: Java 5 has some cool non-language stuff. Concurrency utils, sun’s VM improved, class sharing, memory prebaking, lots of Swing enhancements.
DT: What really sucks is that Java 1.5/5 is driven by marketing, not technical reasons. We’re chasing C#.
BG: Interestinly, the 2 architects of the change, Neil Gafter/Joshua Bloch are now gone {from Sun}.
Qn: What are you reading right now?
CJ: Mostly the other speakers books.
SH: Comics. I have dense tier books and lighter books. On the dense side, Paul Graham’s Lisp book should be waiting for me when I get home. On the lighter; “True names”. All of the little known (Hen: non-fiction educational) books by Asimov, a brilliant writer, very easy to open page anywhere.
BG: Just finished Douglas Adams, (Hen: Ben reads his books regularly). “Short history of nearly everything”, “Pragmatic Automation”, “Paradox of Complexity”, “Bible” as I’m curious of simularities between new and old testaments. Forbes is the only magazine I read as the Java community has no real magazine.
RL: Better, Faster Java. Rod Johnson’s J2EE book.
TN: Reviews of .Net books. Bob Bosheman(?)’s SQL Server 2005 book.
Java-wise, Better Faster, Project Automation.
3 volume history of the civil war (shelby foot?).
Comic books (X-Men).
DT: Not much reading, mainly working on the 2nd edition of the Ruby book. Also a typesetting book; TeX/LaTeX has gotten interesting again and reading the LaTeX companion.
Also, “Blue Horizons”, and a long-term correspondent from the Middle Easts notes (before the troubles) about Baghdad and other parts of the Middle East.
EH: AspectJ in Action. JSF by David Geary. ‘Kapra’?
“Dao Physics” and “Uncommon Wisdom”. A Tom Robbins book.
Qn: Testing GUI based code. How?
BG: Lots and lots of testers. Abbot + Costello exist in the Swing world.
TN: non-java specific, older windows stuff. JDK 1.3 Robot stuff.
CJ: Evaluated 5 Robot projects as a part of the recent book. The Robot stuff just doesn’t work right.
SH: Hard to generalise in a library for this.
Qn: Using cactus/httpunit/junit?
SH: Skip Cactus. HttpUnit covers its