Recent Posts by Joe Darcy

Last week I was off attending my first Java Posse Roundup in scenic Crested Butte Colorado, pictured below. There were many good discussions related to JDK 7 and other programming, and non-programming, topics. Unfortunately, there were some difficulties with my flight back. Once again, the plane I was flying on had to be rebooted, but at least this time the passengers didn't need to be reinstalled! I missed my scheduled connection in Denver and caught the next flight to the...

In its first week, Project Coin enjoyed a vigorous start with well over a dozen proposals submitted: Strings in switch, Joe Darcy Block Expressions for Java, Neal Gafter Improved Exception Handling for Java , Neal Gafter Automatic Resource Management, Josh Bloch Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation, Jeremy Manson Improved Wildcard Syntax for Java, Neal Gafter Multiline strings, latest revision, Ruslan Shevchenko Use "default" keyword for default visibility,upd...

Below is a Project Coin language proposal form I wrote for Strings in switch; send any comment to the Project Coin mailing list. PROJECT COIN SMALL LANGUAGE CHANGE PROPOSAL FORM v1.0 AUTHOR(S): Joseph D. Darcy OVERVIEW Provide a two sentence or shorter description of these five aspects of the feature: FEATURE SUMMARY: Should be suitable as a summary in a language tutorial. Add the ability to switch on string values analogous to the existing ability to switch on values of the...

The Project Coin OpenJDK page and mailing list are now live. The call for proposal period will run until March 30, 2009. Let the proposing begin!

I was pleased to attend and speak at my first FOSDEM conference this year. The classroom setting of the Free Java Developer Room was certainly different than the cavernous session halls of JavaOne! My talks were on OpenJDK 6 and Project Coin: OpenJDK 6: Where are we now? Where are we going? Project Coin: Small Language Changes for JDK 7 Mark spoke on modularity and overall plans for JDK 7 and Alex spoke on progress towards a universal VM. Another enjoyable aspect of FOSDEM for me...

As announced by Kelly, after a successful trial the final read/writeMercurial repositories for OpenJDK 6 are now available. Thanks to Kelly for putting in the extra effort to create change sets approximating history information of the pre-Mercurial phase of OpenJDK 6! The build tags correspond to the state of the source code shipped with the indicated build. Martin has already made a series of external-to-Sun pushes and I'm looking forward to more people contributing to the...

Complementing the three grade school R's of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, I've heard it said there are three R's of Windows system administration, retry, reboot, and reinstall. When flying recently, I experienced the Windows R's being applied to airplane maintenance too. After everyone had boarded the plane, the pilot announced there was a problem with the navigation system and they were trying repeatedly to clear the problem. After that didn't work, the pilot came back...

The name of the OpenJDK project hosting small language changes for JDK 7 will be Project Coin. Besides a coin literally being small change, to "coin a phrase" is to create a little bit of new language. The website for the project and its mailing lists will come into being this February. In the mean time, the initial form to use to propose a language change is listed below. If you have an idea for a change, please work on the form and post it the Project Coin mailing list once...

One of the most exciting new features in 6u10 was the new Java Plug-in. I'm happy to announce that within the next few months as part of OpenJDK, we are Sun are committed to open sourcing our Java Web Start implementation and the new plug-in implementation for NPAPI capable browsers; those browsers including Firefox 3, amongst others.