Chaotic Java

After not touching the yielder project for a long time, I decided to go back and make the change I knew I needed but feared of doing: changing from the visitor model to the tree model of ASM.

It wasn’t even about performance anymore, as I was sure that the performance would be just as great. It was about needing to rethink the entire model again, and about being lazy.

Laziness is the end of all home-made projects, indeed.

Enough rants. I made the change, and now all the problems the previous version used to have – such as methods not necessarily working in a yield clause etc, are working.

Please, read all about it here, and get it from the Google Code project here. And obviously, let me know how it works for you, either in comments or on the issues page, here.

Thanks!

It’s called garbage collection, not resource collection!

Java’s garbage collector has made life so easy for us developers that we sometimes confuse between deleting a reference, i.e. a task the GC does, and releasing a resource – a task the GC doesn’t do. That’s because the GC does something else for us called object finalization, where resources usually clean themselves up.

When I say resources, just think of input/output streams, readers/writers, channels, JDBC, JMS.. the list could go on and on. I almost expect to see code such as: Continue reading »

While the Java community celebrates the release of JavaFX 1.0, two JSRs are striving to teach us again how to write Swing applications – this time, the easy way. JSR 295 addresses property manipulations and bindings, not just in the Swing framework but throughout the Java platform; JSR 296 simplifies Java application creation using Swing, bringing a “Swing for the rest of us” kind of approach.

In this post, I’ll discuss JSR 296 and what it brings, and my opinion of where it could be improved; in the followup post I’ll discuss JSR 295, and try to do the same for that. Continue reading »