Re: Java Issues & Directions

So what is MXML? Some eg? How different is XAML? What will be the features?

Well, MXML is what Macromedia is using for Flex. There was a slide in Eckel's presentation that showed some code. That was what I said looked quite similar to ASP.NET code. XAML is going to be for desktop based apps. MXML, like ASP .NET, is for web apps. An interesting idea is if you want to provide an "enhanced" experience for Longhorn, when you visit a website, instead of sending back HTML code, it will send back XAML code. So instead of viewing a UI within the browser, you now get a full fleged Windows app. It would be great if there is some sort of standard that can be implemented on all platforms.

There are a lot of competing technologies in the Java Community. In a way I feel this is very healthy. Ease of development I feel is a different issue. Java is not as close to the stuff like what i think MXML might be. Though tools are improving very rapidly and also the lang after Java 1.5. Btw this is how the latest SWT looks like. It doesn't look native but would you use it?

Definitely agree that the competing technologies make it healthy. Just wondering if there are any efforts in the Java world to come up with something like XAML. As in, declarative UI. This would straightaway make it really easy to build UI's.

The Eclipse app looks great. What languages does it support?

This article should explain most of the stuff. One part I noticed is that there is no EJB equivalent. Isn't ADO for database connectivity? What is COM+ ? Is it a part of .NET?

The article helped clear up some stuff. But I still couldn't figure out what exactly EJB does.

Yeah, ADO .NET is for database connectiviy... equivalant to JDBC. COM+ is stuff like Message Queueing, Transaction management etc... It was available starting with Window 2000. .NET just provides a managed layer on top of it. For ex, there is a Transaction attribute you can apply to methods, which presumably uses COM+. These are called Enterprise Services in .NET. I dunno much about this stuff. I don't really understand what it means to be an "enterprise" app.

Ya.. The video was very helpful. One part i did not understand was about was the advanced generics stuff, Factory etc.

I didn't understand the Factory stuff either. It felt like he was trying to get around the limitations of Generics. Just confused me more.

Firstly I have to say that I appreciate what Eckel had to say about Java. Those were facts and can't deny anything. Everything he said about Generics, Erasure, ease of use I could take. But Cooncurrency did really hurt. .NET has helped Java as well. I hope that things get better and fast.

I thought it was a good video. I felt it was not biased at all. Some dudes when giving talks are so biased it sickens me. He just gave a critical view of what he thought could be better in the platform.