Java

Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date

Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald: With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with ... (read more)

2005/06/17

Open Source, Insert Foot

As a Java devotee, I grimace whenever language inventor James Gosling expounds to the press on the subject of open source. In a story noting the 10th birthday of Java, Gosling said, "We did do it as close to open source as you could and still be a corporation." Last month, Gosling responded to an Apache proposal to create an open source version of Java with puzzlement: It's often difficult to get a good picture from the open source community of what they actually object to in what we're doing. ... (read more)

2005/06/14

Choosing a Programmer's Editor

A reader laments the difficulty of writing programs in a plain-vanilla text editor: I have a question that I can't seem to frame correctly. It relates to my inability to format nested punctuation (in any language, on any day). I would dearly love to see a quasi-visual editor which replaces the {{ ... }} with nested shading, and bold type used to identify classes, italics for variables, etc. etc. It clearly calls for a different approach to the text-bound, linear approach to coding. What would ... (read more)

2005/05/29

An e-mail from a reader of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours: i really enjoyed reading what you wrote and especially the way you wrote it!! all i want to know now is how i can make a virus because some of my pals are bugging me and i'm really pissed! and like you i feel that i'd rather be georgia vs. mafiaboy !! thanks again and please send me a repley as soon as possible and please please make sure to include a virus making "formula in it". bye ... (read more)

2005/05/28

Mason Glaves believes that Sun has killed the Java Media Framework without telling anyone: If you've got a six-month project, and you only need one small addition, or one small bug-fix to JMF to complete it on time, it's fairly easy to assume that by the time the release date comes around, you'll have the next release of JMF and will be ready to go. The next release is not coming. From the chatter on the list it has become more and more obvious that Sun has quietly abandoned JMF, but isn't ... (read more)

2005/04/11

Sun Frowns on StringTokenizer

While working on a new Java book this weekend, I discovered that Sun is now discouraging programmers from using the java.util.StringTokenizer class, as noted in the class documentation: StringTokenizer is a legacy class that is retained for compatibility reasons although its use is discouraged in new code. It is recommended that anyone seeking this functionality use the split method of String or the java.util.regex package instead. The following example illustrates how the String.split method ... (read more)

2005/04/03

May Diverse Be With You

The ongoing debate over weblogger diversity leaves me wishing there were better tools to find new voices making their way up the long tail. I'm too lazy to find them on my own (with the exception of new bloggers in Jacksonville and St. Augustine), so I link to the same people often -- mostly the crowd of plugged-in web technologists who I have read for years. They are admittedly a largely white and male group, but I assuage my liberal guilt by linking often to Bill Lazar, who as you may not ... (read more)

2005/03/18

Java Has Me Outnumbered

I spent this afternoon working on several hundred mostly minor edits for the next printing of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Fourth Edition. There was one major change: The javac compiler defaults to support for new features such as generics, autoboxing, and the data structure-crawling for loop. The default was originally to turn these off unless the -source 1.5 command-line option was employed. It's no longer necessary, though you can use -source 1.4 to turn off the new features and ... (read more)

2005/03/07

Bush Clock Down for the Count

Four years ago today, I marked the inauguration by publishing a Java applet counting down the seconds "until the U.S. has an elected president again." I'm taking a beating in e-mail this morning from random strangers who remembered the clock and came back to taunt me. I'm not one to shy away from abuse (I'm a Democrat, after all), but there's a point I'd like to make to fuck@you.com and the other people who were kind enough to write. In 2 minutes and 13 seconds, the U.S. will have an elected ... (read more)

2005/01/20

Thinking Outside the Box

Although I have been touting the new autoboxing and unboxing feature in Java 2 version 5, I didn't realize how far the language is willing to go with these automatic conversions. The following code doesn't work in version 4: public void setDeposit(Float deposit) {   if (deposit >= 0) {     this.deposit = deposit;   } } You can't use a comparison operator like ">" to compare a Float object and a float value -- an "incompatible types" error indicates ... (read more)

2004/12/31

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