[ome-devel] Opinions on Java 5

[Robert C. Leif]

   Although Java has some benefits over C and C++, its major virtue was a
brilliant sales campaign. Java was introduced without generics or enumerated
types.  I gather that generics, which are extremely useful, have finally
been added.  Does Java 5 have enumerated types?  Aonix
(http://www.aonix.com/) has an add-on for hard real-time that should be
useful.  C# is a similar effort by Microsoft and ECMA.  C# does not appear
to be used much, if at all, on other operating systems. 
   Since some of you might not know that an alternative to both languages,
Ada, exists, I have added the following to provide an idea of what should be
expected in a programming language.  Ada has portability including maximum
operating system independence, ISO standardization, excellent generics,
safety, readability, superior real-time performance including rate-monotonic
scheduling, interfaces to C and other languages, and good error messages.
Obviously, there are advantages for a GNU compiler.  In fact the best
implementation of Ada is the GNU compiler, GNAT.  I do not know about other
GNU compilers.  However, the support for a free compiler can be greater than
the price of a commercial compiler with support.  For instance AdaCore
(http://www.gnat.com/) prefers to sell support for their Professional
(commercial edition) for $10,000 for four seats per year.  The free version,
3.15, of the compiler is about 3 years old and the free version of the
environment is over one year old.  Academics can get the Professional
Edition free.
   Bob Leif
   
   -----Original Message-----
From: Josh Moore [mailto:josh.moore at gmx.de] 
Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2005 1:10 AM
To: ome-devel Development
Subject: [ome-devel] Opinions on Java 5
   
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   Seems like I haven't started a good heated discussion in a while so
   anyone got an opinion:
   
   	Does it make sense to use Java 5 on the server side?
   
   This ties in to the "Explorations of alternative architectures for
   remote clients" thread. The code I've written currently has dependency
   on Java 5 _for the server side_.
   
   However, this makes server development on OS X 10.3 impossible and on
   10.4 apparently difficult. It also complicates installation, at least
   for most people at the moment. (Java 5 uptake has been relatively slow.)
   
   The pros of using it are:	
    - generics
    - a few API methods and non-thread safe objects
      (StringBuilder rather than StringBuffer, etc.)
    - possible use of annotations (e.g. http://annotations.hibernate.org/)
    - ...
   
   The performance gain doesn't really count because one can use the new
   JDK but still compile for JRE>=1.4 (or maybe even 1.3)
   
   However (again) if we don't do it now, we'll need to do a "port" at
   sometime in the future.
   
   Ho hum.
   
   Any thoughts?
     Josh.
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