Danny’s Blog

This year’s JavaPolis (no, someone thought, “we have a great name for our conference but we have to change it, so let’s choose the worst name we can come up with,” and renamed it to Devoxx) for me started off with a university session on JavaFX. I was hoping to get an introductory overview–and that’s [...]

Twenty years ago, my first job was to assist visitors of the Computerette–something of an Internet café without the Internet. This small company had been started by someone who did freelance jobs coding some very obscure Cobol dialect. While he kept doing his well-paid job, he hired me to take care of the shop. Besides [...]

How about those annotations? Haven’t they made the once simple and elegant Java language into a unintelligible mixed-up mess of code and metadata? These are just two outcries of despair about annotations that I found on the Internet, both written by able and experienced Java developers:
“We have been seeing this for awhile via XDoclet, and [...]

Thursday’s JavaPolis keynote starts with Bruce Eckel doing basically a partner slot — a 45 minute promotion speech for Flex (what else). What’s this doing at a Java conference? How much did Adobe pay for….. — Oh. Okay. I just saw the first demo. I want to use this! Show me more! And it works [...]

Bob Lee’s session on Guice got mixed reviews. Having already seen his introduction to Guice, I had an pretty good idea of what Guice is, so I enjoyed hearing about his 50 or so best practices and previews of things to come. However, I spoke with another visitor afterwards who was less impressed; he had [...]

This plan was doomed from the start: leave from work at 4PM and try to reach Antwerp within two hours, so I could collect my badge and goody bag tonight instead of tomorrow morning (together with 2000 fellow JavaPolis visitors). It was worth a try, but I should have known you can’t beat the Dutch [...]

Just when I was about to drive off to Antwerp for this year’s JavaPolis, I learned that a fire has started in Antwerp’s nuclear plant ‘Doel’. Apparently the fire is located in a side building and there’s no immediate danger to the public. Which is exactly what I would say to prevent complete chaos from [...]

One thing I miss in the current BGGA proposal for closures in Java 7, is a good set of examples. There are some examples, but they don’t cover most situations. Also I feel that more examples might better show the advantages of having closures in Java. Of course, as long as the Java compiler has [...]

JavaBlackBelt is a fast growing community whose members take tests to assess their skills in various Java-related topics. The tests themselves are created also by the site’s members. A small number of Ruby enthusiasts is currently working to add a Ruby exam to this Java-oriented site. I interviewed Mr. John Rizzo, one of JavaBlackBelt’s founders, [...]