Tag Archives: Java/Java EE

The 8 Nights of Java – Night 4

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing The 8 Nights of Java series, tonight we focus on one of the single most important releases of Java. Java 1.4 was released a time when many businesses were starting to look to Java as a foundation for their software systems. After years of licensing proprietary or difficult to use software, Java was seen as a breadth of fresh air for many software engineers. It was helped, in part, by the decline of Windows-based computers and explosive growth of Mac and open-source Linux systems in the workplace and in homes. After all, if all of your developers are using different operating systems, then you need a software development platform that works on all of them and in that, Java was a success. So many business adopted Java 1.4 during this time and stayed on Java 1.4 for over a decade. In fact, many large enterprise systems still rely on Java 1.4 to this day. Hopefully, someone will be hired to update them soon!

Jump to: [Night 1 | Night 2 | Night 3 | Night 4 | Night 5 | Night 6 | Night 7 | Night 8]

Java 1.4 Notable Features
Sun released Java 1.4 (codename Merlin) on February 6th, 2002. Key new functionality included:

  • Regular expressions
  • Assertions
  • NIO Version 1
  • XML/XSLT support

From Jeanne:

I love regular expressions. They are one of my favorite language features because they are concise and expressive when written well. I was excited when they came out. While I started programming as a full time job after Java 1.4 was released, we were still using 1.3 as we waited for the application servers to support Java 1.4. This meant I was already employed and got to teach my teammates about regular expressions. I’ve actually given that presentation a number of times since.

I don’t use assertions because I write a lot of unit tests and the unit tests tell me about the type of problem that an assertion would. Tests help me design my code in a way that I don’t need assertions to tell me about the state of affairs. And then there is poor New I/O. I really like Java 7 NIO.2. New I/O “1”, not so much. It served it’s purpose in getting us to NIO.2 though.

From Scott:

I started programming professionally around the time that XML/XSLT were seen as the “new hot technology” to use on build enterprise systems. Having built-in support for XML transformations made Java look cutting edge at the time. While a lot of what is now done with XML is instead done by JSON, XML is still the core of many data-based systems. In fact, numerous web and mobile frond-end languages still use XML for their layouts, even if the developers using them rely solely on a GUI-based editor. Either way, Java 1.4 demonstrated that new technologies could be integrated into the JVM quite rapidly. That said, I’m still waiting for a JSON parser to become part of the standard Java runtime environment!

Java 1.4 also introduced NIO version 1, or NIO.1 for short. While NIO.2 is a quite powerful, if not commonly used framework, NIO.1 is basically dead weight at this point. The NIO.1 API never really caught on and today, very few people rely on file channels and the like. Since a key part of Java is keeping backwards compatibility, it remains part of the JRE, albeit rarely used.

The 8 Nights of Java – Night 3

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing The 8 Nights of Java series, tonight we focus on one of the most monumental, enormous, earth-shattering… no wait, we’re talking about Java 1.3 aren’t we? Java 1.3 has a number of important implementation and JRE changes but from a developer standpoint, very few new features. In retrospect, Java 1.3 was important as helping to make Java more stable and set up some of the hooks that later versions of Java would tie into, but in and of itself, was kind of a minor release.

Jump to: [Night 1 | Night 2 | Night 3 | Night 4 | Night 5 | Night 6 | Night 7 | Night 8]

Java 1.3 Notable Features
Sun brought in the new millennium with Java 1.3 (codename Kestrel), released on May 8, 2000. Key new functionality included:

  • JNDI
  • Hotspot JVM

From Scott:

I’ll be honest, there’s not much in Java 1.3 that find particularly interesting. Yes, JNDI is important but it’s not very exciting and wasn’t really relevant until J2EE servers started becoming commonplace years later. The Hotspot JVM was also important for production and deployment, but did not change how developers wrote code since the change was on the JRE side of things. In other words, Java 1.3 was a bit of a bore. Luckily the next few “nights” of Java more than make up for it!

My personal experience with Java 1.3 wasn’t completely uneventful, though. I took my first database applications course, CS433, back in college around this time. Our task was to design a database-driven web-based system. Because my school had been extremely heavy on theory, it was the first time we could really ‘cut loose’ and build something fun that people could use. We chose to build an toy auction website powered by Java 1.3, JSPs served by Tomcat, and an IBM DB2 SQL database. My two other teammates and I had so much fun in the course! For extra credit, we decided to integrate our search functionality into eBay, parsing their results and transforming them with XSLT so that our results and their results appeared side-by-side. It was a wonderful time and in hindsight, probably set the foundation for the rest of my Java career!

From Jeanne:

I was still in college when this was released. In fact, I had just started learning Java in 1999.. In summer 2001, I had my first paid job (internship) that used Java. (It was my second internship, but the first used C++.) My main task was using XSLT to generate webpages. I got a fast appreciation for JSPs from that job. Using XSLT added another level of abstraction and another way of thinking while trying to make web pages.

While there wasn’t anything new I cared about at the time, that was because I didn’t know enough. I’m thankful for it though. JNDI is really useful when writing code that runs on a server. I can’t imagine not being able to register a DataSource or JMS queue through JNDI. I imagine some other standard would have arisen to fill the gap if JNDI wasn’t invented.

The 8 Nights of Java – Night 2

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing The 8 Nights of Java series, tonight we focus on Java 1.2. While Java 1.0 and 1.1 were about establishing a strong base and creating a set of classes that directly interfaced with operating system components, such as threads, Java 1.2 was focused on building on top of that base with convenient and reusable classes. For example, you could create your own dynamic array using the built-in primitive arrays, but do you really want to? Java 1.2 answered this by showing that Java was more than just a language, it was a useful set of reusable tools written by software developers, for software developers.

Jump to: [Night 1 | Night 2 | Night 3 | Night 4 | Night 5 | Night 6 | Night 7 | Night 8]

Java 1.2 Notable Features
Sun released Java 1.2 (codename Playground) on December 8, 1998. This version included:

  • Collections framework
  • Swing
  • Java Applet browser plug-in

From Jeanne:

Hard to believe the Collections framework has been with us for so long. It works. There’s lots of collections and opportunities for extension. And I’m thankful we don’t have a Collections2 or Collections3 framework. Something this core is useful to last unchanged. There have been Collection implementations added over time, but that makes sense because it is a framework. Even in Java 8, Oracle added static and default methods so they could leave the interfaces backward compatible.

As for the others. Well. I’ve written exactly one Swing program professionally. And I only did it because Console.readPassword() wasn’t available yet at that time. Unfortunately it is still with us. The wonders of “legacy code.” The Java browser plugin served its use. More recently, its contributed to feelings of Java being insecure though. It also contributed to some confusion between Java and JavaScript. I’ll never forget the day the help desk told me to reinstall Java to “solve” a JavaScript browser problem. Needless to say, I declined. And the problem was not related to Java after all. Gasp!

Fun fact: my very first Java program for school used Java 1.2.

From Scott:

I have to agree with Jeanne on this one. Although the Collections framework was a little difficult to use until generics were added in Java 5.0, they were from the start very powerful. I remember studying linked lists, hash maps, tree sets, and sorting in school. While all software developers should know these concepts and be able to implement them… in production software engineering it’s far better to go with a feature-rich implementation that has been written and tested by hundreds of developers than your own piecemeal solution (aka a “square wheel”).

As for Swing, I’ll be honest and say there was never a time I enjoyed programming in Swing. Even “back in the day” the Swing UI already looked quite dated. It was very difficult to write Swing code that looked good without relying on a number of often proprietary plugins, which required licenses to use. I remember registering for courses online (pilot program at the time, previous students had to do so in person) and a Swing app popped up within the browser, then promptly crashed 4-5 times in a row. I don’t know if the Swing apps I had the misfortune to use were just poorly written, poorly designed, or the underlying technology was just flawed. The one thing I do know is that I have never looked at a Swing app (either one that I’ve written or used) and thought it looked “beautiful” or was “easy to use”.

The limitation of Swing, as well as other Java UI languages, still holds true today in professional software development. While many people use Java for back-end systems, most use some flavor of Javascript (Angular, Node.js, Ajax) or mobile design tool (xib, storyboard, view, layout) for the majority of their front-end work. Even JavaFX, which was later billed as the “greatest Java UI language since Swing” was never able to gain much ground, in part because so many developers carried over a dislike of Swing. I do wonder how Java would be different today, if Swing had been easier to use and looked nicer.