Most important feature of Java 7 by Danny Coward

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Matthias Lübken

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May 20, 2008, 3:02:45 AM5/20/08
to The Java Posse
Hey guys

I've just listened to the latest Episode "#187 - Java SE 7 Interview
with Danny Coward". What I've found really interesting was his most
important feature of Java 7: Modularity!

Too bad that he didn't get into any details, especially concerning
interoperability with OSGi.

So didn't the Posse want to do a special about bringing the OSGi and
277 guys together in an joined interview? Please go ahead and do this
interview. In a couple of months it's going to be to late.

Matt

Neil Bartlett

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May 20, 2008, 6:02:48 AM5/20/08
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I agree what would be great. I did suggest this to Dick once and he
said he would probably do it, however that was about a year ago.

On May 20, 8:02 am, Matthias Lübken <matthias.lueb...@gmail.com>
wrote:

David Linsin

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May 20, 2008, 6:42:35 AM5/20/08
to java...@googlegroups.com
I guess the real problem is that Sun is not very open about what's
going on, as mentioned here

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/jsr277-osgi


with kind regards,

David Linsin
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
email: dli...@gmail.com
blog: http://dlinsin.blogspot.com

Matthias Lübken

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May 20, 2008, 7:54:13 AM5/20/08
to The Java Posse

> I guess the real problem is that Sun is not very open about what's
> going on, as mentioned here http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/jsr277-osgi

But maybe the Posse has the chance and get those guys together and
give the Java community an update about the "most important feature"
of Java 7.

BoD

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May 20, 2008, 7:58:07 AM5/20/08
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+1
:)

BoD

Casper Bang

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May 20, 2008, 9:24:14 AM5/20/08
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The most important feature actually being shipping though. And there
is no Java 7 JSR yet right? I wonder how come so many blogs talk about
reified generics and closures for Java 7. We're already below the
average 18 month threshold for a JSR to yield a production ready
reference impl. In contrast, JSR-260 took 22 months.

/Casper

On May 20, 1:54 pm, Matthias Lübken <matthias.lueb...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> > I guess the real problem is that Sun is not very open about what's
> > going on, as mentioned herehttp://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/jsr277-osgi

basZero

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May 20, 2008, 4:42:08 AM5/20/08
to The Java Posse
That's the same I though too.
Matt, I hope you did not miss this very nice post about the OSGi vs
JSR 277 topic:
http://atsatt.blogspot.com/2008/04/jsr-277-interoperation.html

cheers
balz

On May 20, 9:02 am, Matthias Lübken <matthias.lueb...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Balz

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May 20, 2008, 4:58:33 AM5/20/08
to The Java Posse
Hi Matt,
somehow my first reply does not show up.
so maybe this here is duplicated (please ignore in that case).

if you are interested in OSGi and 277, I hope you did not miss this
good post here about it:
http://atsatt.blogspot.com/2008/04/jsr-277-interoperation.html

cheers
balz

On May 20, 9:02 am, Matthias Lübken <matthias.lueb...@gmail.com>
wrote:

douglass...@gmail.com

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May 21, 2008, 10:45:22 AM5/21/08
to The Java Posse
I was really disappointed in the lack of real news content in this
interview. Why did he spend so much time praising Sun and the JCP
while Java 7 is still at least a year away? Get on the ball and get
moving Sun! We are not going to get closures into Java in a
reasonable amount of time if they don't pick up the pace.

Jess Holle

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May 21, 2008, 12:01:18 PM5/21/08
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I don't think the lack of "real news" was due to a lack of candor on
Danny's part. I think he explained this pretty clearly. The issue is
not so much the JCP here, but rather that open sourcing Java 7 and
making really major improvements to Java 6 have both delayed Java 7.

While we could all wish that wasn't so (and I certainly do), it should
come as no surprise whatsoever -- at least not to anyone who has ever
tried to juggle multiple release streams and their priorities/schedules
themselves.

--
Jess Holle

Casper Bang

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May 21, 2008, 1:14:08 PM5/21/08
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Once again, makes me wonder how much resources JavaFX consumes and
whether it's worth it, considering far more people appear to be asking
for more innovation and leanness in the language rather than a new RIA
technology. It caused Hans Muller not being able to finish his JSR-296
stuff, and I guess potentially it's the reason for him leaving Sun for
Adobe - only he would know.
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/15/sun_rich_client_adobe/

/Casper

On May 21, 6:01 pm, Jess Holle <je...@ptc.com> wrote:
> I don't think the lack of "real news" was due to a lack of candor on
> Danny's part.  I think he explained this pretty clearly.  The issue is
> not so much the JCP here, but rather that open sourcing Java 7 and
> making really major improvements to Java 6 have both delayed Java 7.
>
> While we could all wish that wasn't so (and I certainly do), it should
> come as no surprise whatsoever -- at least not to anyone who has ever
> tried to juggle multiple release streams and their priorities/schedules
> themselves.
>
> --

Joshua Marinacci

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May 21, 2008, 1:20:52 PM5/21/08
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JavaFX is only a small part of the JavaSE group. There are hundreds of
people working on JavaSE and only about 10 full time people on
JavaFX. JavaFX really doesn't consume many resources from the rest of
the Java org. This is mostly because JavaFX gets to ride on a lot of
the improvements in JavaSE for free. Improvements like JavaSE 6
update 10 that we needed to do anyway.

While Chet and Hans are great engineers and they will be greatly
missed (and good friends of mine), I hope we can get a bit of
perspective here. They are two engineers out of hundreds. Two
engineers don't make or break an entire technology stack, even when
they are important engineers. We have lots of great people working on
Desktop Java and JavaFX, many who have been at Sun for a decade or
more. We'll be fine. :)

- Josh

Joshua Marinacci

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May 21, 2008, 1:22:41 PM5/21/08
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Oh, and I should mention that JSR-296 was scheduled for Java 7. When
Java 7 was pushed back because we wanted to get Java SE 6 u10 out the
door sooner (which was, honestly, more important), that meant that JSR
296 was pushed back as well. It's not going away, though. 296 will
still be developed and included in a future JRE. After all, we have
great support for it in NB, so we can't abandon it.

- J

On May 21, 2008, at 10:14 AM, Casper Bang wrote:

Michael Neale

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May 22, 2008, 6:53:46 AM5/22/08
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Ahem--- is that an official statement from Sun ?? ;) cause its not AT
ALL what everyone else is hearing. Couple that with the giant sucking
sound coming from adobe...

I'm just saying... that I don't believe you ;)

Lars Westergren

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May 22, 2008, 7:21:01 AM5/22/08
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> Ahem--- is that an official statement from Sun ?? ;) cause its not AT
> ALL what everyone else is hearing.

Um, I don't know what everyone else have been hearing? I've seen some
wild speculations on teh interwebs... but with no facts to back them
up that I'm aware of.

Cheers,
Lars

Joshua Marinacci

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May 22, 2008, 11:53:17 AM5/22/08
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Well, Sun has no official position on rumors spread on 'teh
interwebs'. However, it is true that organization within Sun which
builds core Java has hundreds of talented engineers, many of whom have
been working on client side Java for over a decade. We aren't going
anywhere.

Regarding people leaving for Adobe: would you say that Adobe should
worry if one of their top engineers on Photoshop or Lightroom went to
MS?

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/04/29/microsoft_adobe_hire/

The movement to build RIAs and the battle (if we should call it that)
between the RIA platforms is far bigger than a few engineers, and it's
going to be around far longer than the couple of years the platforms
have been competing. We are talking about merging the desktop with
the web (which, btw, is *awesome*). This is a long term trend that
will eventually be on every human facing device you have.

- Josh

Michael Neale

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May 23, 2008, 8:37:45 PM5/23/08
to The Java Posse
I think the "battle" for RIAs is important, and I would LOVE for
JavaFX to be successful (as successful as flash/flex seems to be now).
I think its awesome - both the demos I have seen, and the Javafx-
script is genius. I would love to use fx-script - one of the points
that no one notices is that is statically typed - I have found when I
build UIs with static type checking I have a lot less frustration as I
don't leave silly typos in there for hours/weeks (as UI code is really
hard to test thoroughly) - in that case, compile errors are your
friend !

However, from an individuals point of view, when there is a sword
hanging overhead (Sun layoffs) versus an offer on the table (from
adobe) I can totally understand that people would move, nothing to do
with technology at all.

So good luck, I think its an uphill battle, but hey, in silicon valley
thats the only way things work ;) not guts, no glory !

Matthias Lübken

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May 26, 2008, 10:35:17 AM5/26/08
to The Java Posse


On May 20, 9:02 am, Matthias Lübken <matthias.lueb...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> So didn't the Posse want to do a special about bringing the OSGi and
> 277 guys together in an joined interview? Please go ahead and do this
> interview. In a couple of months it's going to be to late.

Just a small follow up: In Episode #188 the Posse said it's a time
issue for setting up this interview.

Well I still hope you guys could manage to do this joined interview. I
would highly appreciate it!

robogeek

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May 28, 2008, 8:25:48 AM5/28/08
to The Java Posse
On May 21, 9:01 am, Jess Holle <je...@ptc.com> wrote:
> I don't think the lack of "real news" was due to a lack of candor on
> Danny's part.  I think he explained this pretty clearly.  The issue is
> not so much the JCP here, but rather that open sourcing Java 7 and
> making really major improvements to Java 6 have both delayed Java 7.
>
> While we could all wish that wasn't so (and I certainly do), it should
> come as no surprise whatsoever -- at least not to anyone who has ever
> tried to juggle multiple release streams and their priorities/schedules
> themselves.
>
> --
> Jess Holle


You can also wish for a time machine, eh? Because I think some kind
of miracle machine would be required to meet a mid-2009 date (as Danny
said at JavaOne) and have a JSR for a big feature like Closures to be
in Java 7. Even the Posse has lost track of how many Closures
proposals there are, so that indicates the level of disagreement in
the community about which way is the best to implement Closures. Do
you think that would be resolvable in the proposed Java 7 timeframe?
A little known feature of the release schedules is the beta period..
so while Danny suggested mid-2009 as the release date for Java 7,
since we normally use a 9+ month beta cycle and that means features
for Java 7 should be finished by Novemberish 2008.

As for JSR 277/294/OSGi.. let me refer you to Mandy Chung who has been
blogging about this:- http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mandychung/

Having OSGi interoperate within the modules system is a big goal
(now).

- David Herron

Ricardo

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May 29, 2008, 9:53:14 AM5/29/08
to The Java Posse
Check out the 2nd featured video under the 2nd Sun General Session on
Day 1 of JavaOne. It is the video of Danny Coward talking about Java
7.
http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/sessions/general/index.jsp
I think he covers the modules feature pretty well.

-R
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