The ongoing evolution of Java

Java continues to evolve. That's a good thing, of course, but it can be a little bit overwhelming trying to keep up, even in the focused areas of concern to me.

A brief set of capsule reports from my small area of Java-related interests:

• JUnit has released version 4.8. This version adds the new annotations Category, IncludeCategory, and ExcludeCategory, as well as the Categories test runner. Meanwhile, I'm still stuck on version 3 of JUnit, as are many codebases that I know about. Is there an automated assistant which helps with the transition from JUnit 3.X to JUnit 4.X? How do others deal with this migration?


• Mark Reinhold announced that JDK 1.7 has slipped to September 2010. However, as part of this slippage, there is also increasing anticipation that some form of closures will make the 1.7 release. That closures syntax looks pretty horrendous to me, and reminds me of ancient C-language function prototype syntax; I hope they can see their way to building something less grotesque.


• Meanwhile, in more near-term JDK 1.7 news, apparently Escape Analysis is now enabled by default as part of 1.7 Milestone 5. Escape Analysis is a very powerful compiler optimization which can dramatically reduce object allocation under certain circumstances. If you want to learn more about it, here's a good place to start; that weblog posting contains a pointer to Brian Goetz's fascinating analysis of Java memory allocation from 2005.

Back in Derby land, we're still somewhat stuck on JDK 1.4. We only dropped support for JDK 1.3 about 18 months ago, so we tend to be fairly conservative and support the older Java implementations long after others have moved on.

But there seems to be some pressure building to consider moving to JDK 1.5 as a base level of support. I think it's increasingly hard to find significant Java deployment environments where JDK 1.5 is not the standard, so I don't think it will be that much longer before Derby makes the jump to assuming a base JDK 1.5 level.

For example, it appears that the new Android Java system ("Dalvik") works best with Java bytecodes that are built by a JDK 1.5 compiler, and the Dalvik VM tools issue warnings when pointed at the Derby jar files.

As the Red Queen said to Alice:

you have to run as fast as you can to stay where you are; if you want to go somewhere, you have to run twice as fast as that