David Flanagan: Finally, to pique your interest I'll add that the second paragraph of the preface and the second sentence of Chapter 1 both mention something that is supposed to remain a secret until JavaOne. If you can get your hands on a copy before then, you can be in the know while it is still secret. (Hint: notice that I've been referring to this next release of Java by its codename.)
Let me guess: The next release of Java will have a shockingly novel real name, like the JDK? No. Better than that, how about "The next release of Java will be called Java 5"?
Nathan Tippy told me he prefers Eclipse over IDEA: "The key bindings a so unnatural in IDEA."
Well, Eclipse is certainly getting better and better. But I still prefer IDEA.
Paul Jensen gave a OCI internal presentation on Spring Framework. It's a very good talk. The good news is that Paul will give an extended version of it at the St. Louis Java User's Group in November. The JUG is open to everybody and is free.
While you are at the JUG homepage, also check out the presentations for the next few months: Velocity in July, Eclipse Plugins in August, Pluto in September, J2ME in October, and Groovy in December!
I met Zhicheng at the lunch meeting. He told me he still needs to figure out something for the project (the one I left a couple of weeks ago). It's a Swing JTextField that has a fixed length limit (using a DocumentFilter). The problem is that it doesn't work in Japanese.
The crux of the problem is that "Toyota" is a two character string in Japanese, yet needs six keystrokes (or more) to enter in, for example, the Windows XP Japanese IME. The screen representation simply morphs as you type.
If you have dealt with the problem before and would like to share the secret, drop me a line.
My new project is in C++. "My sympathies" was what both my old Java colleagues and my new C++ ones tell me.
Hallway conversations that I overhear reveal that C++ people works on all sorts of weird platforms. And I thought Java was supposed to be cross-platform. Apparently it's any platform as long as it is Windows, Solaris, or Linux. OK, OK, and the Mac OS X (on your 17" PowerBook).
And talking about Java and platforms. Yuhang Sun told me something that I think I agree to some extent: "If you are building a GUI application for Windows, use C#. It's so much easier than Java/Swing. Reserve Java/Swing for truly cross-platform applications."
Rob Martin convinced me to use jEdit which he learned from Mario Aquino. What sold me is its hypersearch feature. You have to see it in person to experience it.
"To see it in person to experience it" also summarizes a lot of the XP/Agile/TDD practices. Pair programming and test driven development are two things that a lot of people (especially decision maker types) don't "get". When I said "I highly recommend the XP practices, especially pair programming" on my going away meeting, my team lead went "Huh?"
Talking about XP, I learned the true meaning of "Doing the simplest thing" from Jeff Grigg at last month's JUG meeting. We were talking about the "simplest thing possible" doctrine and how some people uses it as an excuse to do the dumbest thing and leave it that way.
Jeff said that the simplest thing is one part of the story. Before that you must have a set of automated test. The simplest thing refers to the simplest thing that'll make the test pass. And after that, you are supposed to "refactor relentlessly" to better the design of the code.
Without the thing that comes before it and after it, doing the simplest thing possible alone will only lead to chaos.
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