I’m still waiting for “hack” Java hacked javva (don’t ask, long story), but Java SE 6 actually has some pretty sweet features. I’ve been impressed with what Sun is doing lately, they are making the right moves. I’m excited to see what the JRuby guys do with a GPL Java, with any luck they’ll make the JVM much more accommodating to dynamic languages, which includes my favorite Python (Jython)
I love snarky bug reports for some reason. It cracks me up that it took 8 years for Sun to add password prompting to Java. The users increasingly becoming irate in the bug reports is awesome. I wish the programmers would have responded back in a big flame war. I can only imagine what they were saying inside Sun. Good stuff.
Improved interactive console I/O (password prompting, line editing)
IBM DeveloperWorks has a great article on the details of the JVM garbage collector, including some neat foreshadowing of escape analysis that will be present in Java Mustang.
“The Java language does not offer any way to explicitly allocate an object on the stack, but this fact doesn’t prevent JVMs from still using stack allocation where appropriate. JVMs can use a technique called escape analysis, by which they can tell that certain objects remain confined to a single thread for their entire lifetime, and that lifetime is bounded by the lifetime of a given stack frame. Such objects can be safely allocated on the stack instead of the heap. Even better, for small objects, the JVM can optimize away the allocation entirely and simply hoist the object’s fields into registers.”
I’ve been focusing on Python lately, mostly for web development. It is strange, but it doesn’t quite feel ready yet. Obviously, there are large production sites deploying on some of the frameworks like Django, but compared to Java and Tomcat, Python web development is still in the infant stages. Even so, the productivity that Python provides over Java is astonishing. PHP just makes me laugh, though PHP 5 does clean up a lot of the warts. The only good thing I can say about PHP right now is that it is ubiquitous and easy to learn.
I don’t know how I missed it but in late 2004, there was an awesome meeting of the minds at Sun which included:
If Sun would release the JVM under the GPL or BSD or even the Mozilla MPL, and create awesome support for dynamic languages, it would explode all over the web server scene. Heck, I would pay good money for a JVM that had first rate support for Python. It would also help consolidate Ruby, Python, Perl and Java. I guess Parrot could do this, but honestly it will take years for it to be as fast as the JVM on all the platforms Java currently supports. The JVM is an impressive bit of Sun kit, but Sun has tied too closely to the Java language. Sun, open up the JVM even if you keep the Java spec under your control. This is the best of both worlds and would take a major bite out of .NET.
Unfortunately, Sun will probably let the JVM wither away just like they are doing with Solaris. Sigh.
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