IBM's developerWorks has published Java 2007: The year in preview. In this article, I peer into my crystal ball, and predict what we're likely to see happen to Java over the coming year.
Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling, Peter von der Ahé have posted version 0.5 of their Closures for Java proposal. According to Gafter,
There are two significant changes:
- We've dropped the nominal version of the specification. We are no longer maintaining parallel versions of the specification (with and without function types) because the most significant concerns regarding function types were resolved in earlier revisions of the spec.
- We added support for user-defined looping APIs. I wrote about this in October 2006, but did not integrate that into the spec until now.
There is now a two-hour version of my Closures for Java talk on video. It is the same as the one-hour version but with questions and answers both during and after the talk.
Tonight, February 6, is the second iteration of Extreme Tuesday New York. This will be held at the Silver Swan at 41 East 20th Street, starting at 6:30. See you there. Personally I'm going to see if we can get a good discussion of closures in Java going at one of the tables.
Sebastiano Vigna has released version 5.0.6 of fastUtil,
a collection of type-specific Java maps and sets with a small memory footprint
and faster access and insertion. The classes implement their standard counterpart interfaces such as java.util.Map
and can be plugged into existing code. However, they also contain type-specific methods. For instance, the CharList class has not only the usual add(Object o) method but also an add(char c) method.
This release adds a FastBufferedInputStream class and a front() method that
retrieves elements equal to the top from queues.
fastUtil is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Diomidis Spinellis has released UMLGraph 4.6, an open source (BSD license) tool for declaratively specifying UML diagrams. UMLGraph uses text files that look vaguely like source code to specify how UML class and sequence diagrams are drawn. A doclet converts this into a Graphviz diagram that can be easily converted to Postscript, GIF, SVG, JPEG, etc. Version 4.6 is a bug fix release. Java 5 is required.