Genii Weblog


Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 18 Mar 2004, 10:37 PM
Tom Duff reprints an interesting article on "Tiger", the codename for Sun's new J2SE 1.5 (Java 2 SDK - Standard Edition 1.5.0).  I responded with my thoughts on the importance of the various new features, but I would be interested in seeing your responses, especially if you have more experience with Java than I do.

For the record, here are my comments, although you'll have to go read the article to read more about the details.  Do you agree or disagree with my comments?

<<
1) generics will not be as useful/used as the author thinks;
2) metadata will be nice, but not much more;
3) autoboxing will be big, very big;
4) enumerations with methods and fields will be awesome;
5) foreach will rapidly become ubiquitous;
6) varargs will be huge, if implemented well;
7) printf will be huge for C developers moving to Java ;
8) static import will be nice, but not heavily used;
9) and I haven't the faintest about the collections stuff. 

>>

Copyright © 2004 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 18 Mar 2004, 05:16 PM
It is disconcerting that I can't just refer to our Midas Rich Text LSX as "Midas", because now it might be @Midas Formulas instead.  Oh well, times change.

The challenge posed is this.  A previous developer at this company had written an application that used doclinks and titles, but kept them in separate field, one a rich text field and one a text list.  They want to get rid of that rather silly constraint and put the titles in with the titles, more like a newsletter.  The one gotcha is that some of the doclinks are missing, and have some text such as NA (not available) instead of the doclinks.  They just want to skip those lines, including both the title and the "NA".
Inline JPEG image
This illustrates what they have and what they want.  The question was, how would Midas (darn, there I go again - Midas Rich Text LSX) handle this?

Here is the code I came up with.  Not the most elegant in the world, but it shows a real life solution to a real life problem, for those of you who like that sort of thing.

Inline JPEG image

Copyright © 2004 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 18 Mar 2004, 04:53 PM
The following seems like one of those polls software companies like to give, no matter what you answer, it favors them.

Inline JPEG image

While this is from George Bush's website, I am not so naive as to think many other poiticians wouldn't stoop just as low.

When I was in school, I liked multiple choice tests, because you knew one of the answers given was correct.  What do you do when faced with a multiple choice test (or poll) where none of the choices is correct, or at the least where you are not convinced any one is correct?  Whether you give the "closest to correct" answer or abstain, you are playing into the hands of the person giving the poll.  What is a person to do?

Copyright © 2004 Genii Software Ltd.