JSR 310 is proposing a new Date and Time API to replace the current (mostly) deprecated Date and the hard to use Calendar APIs with an alternative. Read the details in the JSR here.
Rumors true – Fleury quits RedHat/JBoss
It was rumored in January that Fleury, who has been out on paternity leave, was about to leave JBoss (now part of Red Hat). It was confirmed on Friday that Fleury has left RedHat and will not be returning.
It will be interesting to see where Fleury goes next and what his next project will be. Fleury arguably created and mastered the ‘Professional Open Source’ business model, not only creating a viable open soure Java EE application server to challenge the major players in the marketplace (IBM, BEA, Oracle), but introducing a sales approach to capitalize on the rising interest of open source software. Fleury sold JBoss to RedHat for $350 million in June 2006.
Facelift for javablogs.com
I haven’t looked at the JavaBlogs.com site for a few days – their site has had a CSS facelift and it looks pretty smart – check it out here.
“Fear and Loathing in TypeLand” – OnJava.com
Robert Cooper has an interesting blog post on the onJava.com site, titled “Fear and Loathing in TypeLand”, in which he touches on the pros and cons of static typing in Java in comparison to dynamic typing in languages like Ruby and Groovy, with references to another blog post on the evang.eli.st site, titled “Java People Must be Stupid”
The interesing point here is it’s obvious (or at least should be) to most developers that one size does not fit all. Every language has it’s strongpoints and weaknesses. Some languages aim to be general problem solving languages, while others are geared to solving problems in a specific domain, or use a specialized approach to solve those problems. To argue that feature A is better than feature B in some cases is a non-argument if feature A allows you to solve a given problem style easier or more effectively. On the other hand, if a language has a feature that may offer a lot of flexibility but at the same time could be misused, then it will be a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot than if it didn’t have that feature…