Tag: java

Thomas Mueller, the creator of the popular pure Java database engine HSQLDB, has released a successor to this popular database, called H2.

The new database has features comparable to MySQL and PostgreSQL, but is intended to be used in low number of concurrent connection scenarios.

To ensure backwards binary compatibility as Java has evolved over the past 10 years, new features have been added but never have features been removed, to avoid breaking the binary compatibility. However over time, we’ve seen the Java JRE and JDK continue to grow from each release to the next. JSR 270, the JSR for JDK 6, proposes the first API to be removed from a future release, and I believe is the first JSR to propose that something be removed from the platform intead of added.

The approach suggested is that the JSR for release N can propose for feature X to be removed in future release N+1. It is then upto the team involved in the implementation of N+1 if they want to go ahead with the feature removal. Mark Reinhold discusses in more details in his blog here.

The feature currently on the chopping block? The javax.sound.midi package. I expect some developers or users of music software on Java may be upset by this, but I don’t expect there to be much resistance on this one.

Xinyu Lu has a great article on java.net this morning which gives an overview of the differences between developing webapps using JSP and JSTL tags, and JSF.

The article also covers JSP2.0 changes, such as the ability to develop new custom tags using a tag file, instead of having to write a handler class – this is a great simplification to help developers.

Netbean’s Matisse GUI builder has made a huge difference in the effort required to build a Swing app – with Netbeans 5.0 now it is possible to build good looking Swing apps with minimal effort.

But what about wiring together actual code with your new GUI front end? Michael Santos has an interesting blog entry on java.net about a project called Genesis that allows you to use annotations to wire up your code to your Swing code. The examples in the article look very simple – this is an approach we should keep our eyes on.