Danny’s Blog

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, [...]

After yet another inspiring presentation by Romain Guy at last year’s JavaPolis, I’ve taken more interest in programming Swing. I programmed desktop applications for many years, using mostly Delphi. Now, after some years of web application development, discovering Swing is like finding back a long-lost friend. Why oh why did we ever turn our backs [...]

In the great Java property debate, a lot of rather exotic ideas have been put forward. Using a new ‘property’ keyword; using an arrow (->) or at-sign (.@) or even a pound-sign to include null-safe access.[1] Me, I don’t get it. Sure, getters and setters make for lines and lines of repetitive code and they’re [...]

Five days after my nightly arrival in beautiful Antwerpen, I drove back over those same dreary roads to Holland, to my home. Five days that have flown by. I’ve been completely submerged in mixture of Java and a little Ruby. Everything I heard about, everything I spoke about, even dreamt about, was Java. I’ve got [...]

Late Thursday afternoon, in a packed room 8 of the JavaPolis venue, Neal Gafter presented his plans for adding closures to Java. He had a very well built up argumentation for why we need closures in Java. Not the usual story about the visitor pattern and putting responsibility in the object where it belongs (e.g. [...]

In the afternoon I attended a session about Phobos. Phobos is a web application framework that uses server-side scripting–JavaScript at first, but they’re already working on support for other languages like JRuby. Phobos’ programming model is less prescriptive than that of Rails, but familiar concepts can be recognized, like a fixed directory structure and a [...]

Okay, okay, I’ll humbly admit I was wrong. A little bit. About ehm… that Groovy thing. An inspiring session by … about the Grails framework made me see things from a different perspective. There’s actually some quite nice features in Grails that could well be of use in Rails (or in some cases, Rails on [...]

On Thursday, Marc Fleury finally delivers his keynote on the open source business. I get distracted by circumstantial details like Fleury’s ridiculous “Public Enemy #1″ costume (reminds me of Steve Ballmer’s stupid monkey dance) and An running around him with her camera like a groupie, trying to catch Marc’s best angle (what lens is she [...]

Wednesday afternoon, JavaPolis really got into gear for me. I saw short ‘quicky’ sessions on Unitils (don’t like the name but some of the features (assertion through reflection!) could be very useful to me, as I’m writing tests on a daily basis) and Strecks (Struts extensions that can easily be used in an existing Struts [...]