Eric Bruno gives us his initial impressions about the latest feature-packed Java 6 Mustang beta release. I kind of agree that the list is particulary tasty and promissing. But I know that I’m not going to use it any soon. Why?

Well, it’s simple. Take our application — BlogBridge — as an example. It has a number of users even with Java 1.4 installed, we have to support them as they represent a significant segment of our user base. We don’t want to take any more maintenance load for having it run on 1.4, 1.5 and now 1.6. You might ask, what maintenance headaches? You might wonder, it all should be compatible!

Yes, it SHOULD, but unfortunately it’s NOT.

I’m not so pessimistic as I might appear from above. It’s just that I can’t taste its wonders fully yet what makes me a little bit worried.

In any case, nice release, guys!

Pito has just told me that the a book “Wicked Cool Java” by Brian D. Eubanks is already available. You can find the review on Slashdot or visit the official site to get more information. In this post I won’t dive deep into details, but will just say why it’s so exciting personally to me.

In the Chapter 4 “Crawling the Semantic Web” the author mentions the project I’ve been involved in as an active contributor for more than two years already — Informa. Informa is the news feeds parsing library with several utility modules greatly simplifying life, own persistence layer with mappings for several most popular database engines, RSS/Atom parsers, exporters etc. In his fourth chapter the author mentions and gives examples of how to use Poller module which is one of my beloved children as well as Cleaner and Persistence Manager.

Well, what can I say!? It’s WICKED COOL and I’m really proud of it even though it looks like there’s no direct mention of me as an author of the modules. ;)

Have a good reading! And go grab the book at Amazon!

Today I had some new interesting testing task. What I needed was to ensure that some method has public and non-static signature. The method plays role of hook in OPML import utility class — the hook, which is used to create Reader object for a given URL. By default, it uses simple InputStreamReader wrapper, but the client application may wish to have something more sophisticated. So, the task was clear — to ensure that this method does not lose its signature, because it already happened once when I was reviewing the code and noticed that this method had unjustified public modifier. That time I changed it to “private static” and the application using this library lost its encoding detection skills.

Today, when I was looking for a bug in encoding detection it was a sort of revelation to see that the code even doesn’t get called. Yeah, sort of blown off the entire leg instead of simply shooting off the boots. So, traditionally I fixed the signature and put some warning for the future, but… the next thought was how to make an automated test to be one hundred per cent sure about it. It appeared simple and I would like to share it with you just to encourage.

public class ImporterTest extends TestCase
{
  // lots of other stuff skipped ...

  public void testCreateReaderForURLDefinition()
    throws NoSuchMethodException
  {
    Method crfu = Importer.class.getMethod(
      "createReaderForURL", new Class[] { URL.class });

    assertEquals("Method should be public and non-static.",
      Modifier.PUBLIC, crfu.getModifiers());
  }
}

Easy and bulletproof.

Hooray! Wonderful news knocking at the door — Advanced Installer for Java (3.3) goes on Mac; and this is a really big step forward. We, as the proud users of AIFJ, are extremely happy to have an opportunity to build the Mac distributions of our application — BlogBridge — without serious messing with console. When we were choosing the installer for the application our main criteria was the presence of the Windows platform support. The Mac support was preferred but rather optional as we knew how to build a distribution package from the command line or with a console script. Of course, having this process automated means a big boost in our performance. A lot of thanks to you guys!

Also the team reports the following changes:

• Inclusion and exclusion filters for Synchronized Folders.
• Editing multiple files’ properties at once.
• File version override.
• Stretched or fixed size switch for dialog banners and bitmaps.
• Configurable Merge Modules.

For those of you who already started to study this wonderful world of enterprise applications programming with EJB3 I suggest to visit fascinating resource on the web — Oracle’s EJB3 Resources. You will find lots of details on nearly every aspect of EJB3 application plus downloadable source code. As a learner, I found many interesting bit there.

Highly recommended!

Just don’t take it very serious. :) The clever guys also do funny things.

public interface Calculator {
  public float add(int a, int b);
  public float subtract(int a, int b);
}

(and I am not about number of methods)

Smile! :)