Wie geht's weiter mit Java?

This was a talk by Klaus Kreft and Angelika Langer, about what could possibly be in Java version 7.0.

The core of the talk hit language extensions (closures and concise instance declarations), new module functionality and other bits and pieces that could come in. All the items discussed had come out of the Java Community Process, more specifically the Java Specification Request (JSR) system.

Closures and concise instance declarations come from the demands of developers who want scripting language extensions to the core Java language - mainly because the enjoy using them in these languages. Now, I am a big fan of scripting languages, and the power that they give the developer, but the syntax that was recommended didn't look so good to me. The new Concise instance declarations syntax was also crap.

The new module functionality seemed to me to be a straight rip-off from maven. The idea of a super-package declaration that stops certain other packages being access able in a jar file, did seem to have merit. There is another JSR about the OSGi core service platform model, which is a more dynamic version of the modules idea. From what the gurus said, then this one would be the one to vote for. Unfortunately, this part of the talk was given by Frau Langer. She, like all the other female presenters, spoke far too quickly and I started drifting off in the middle. ho hum.

Finally there was a JSR for Swing, which is something I will have to look at, and a JSR about units and quantities that you could use in your application to convert between meters and feet with very little overhead.

Although it was in German, this was a nice technical start to day 4 of our conference.