Robert Casto
Software Developer and Performance Engineer
Java 7 Delayed again. Considering Scala…
Sep 8th
Well, it looks like JDK 7 is going to be delivered sometime in 2011 and JDK 8 will be in 2012. I’m all for smaller releases and shorter time between them. The only way to get adoption of new technologies is to get them out into the hands of developers and see how it plays out. The community wants a release so bad they are ready to take anything at this point. It has been 5 years since the release of JDK 6 and while it is a very good release, there are many things promised that would improve the platform and give it life again.
Waiting another 2 years to get features that are in Scala today seems like a waste of time. Sure, there are many developers who can wait since they are still working on projects with JDK 4 or 5. These shops will be ready for the new features when they are good and ready. The rest of us want the new JDK now though, and it looks like the wait is going to be even longer.
I have not looked at Scala before now, but I’m going to. My development work is still in JDK 6 for the Android platform. I don’t see that changing in the near future, but as far as languages go, Scala seems to have the mind power behind it to make it. The other languages I have looked at such as Groovy, JRuby, et. al. are nice, but it appears that momentum is behind Scala and so that is where I’m going to be focusing my learning. I just hope that JDK 7 comes out sooner than later.
Bitten by the sharedUserId attribute in Android
Aug 20th
While doing some work to create a second version of an Android application, I got hit with log errors that said my application database was not accessible. In fact, all data was not available to the application. After some digging, I found the following 2 issues relating to this problem.
- Issue #3763 If you decide to change the sharedUserId value, application will not have access to its data.
- Issue #1227 If you add sharedUserId to your application when it was not there before.
So the short answer is, I have to write content providers to get the data from the old version to the new one. I was hoping to just copy the application files but of course, the simple route is blocked.
The lesson to be learned is that the sharedUserId value should ALWAYS be set on an application. That way you have the choice of creating an upgrade, pro, paid, etc version of your application. Otherwise you will have to spend time creating content providers to copy the information over since you won’t be able to share the information.
New chip to bridge iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry?
Jun 17th
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/intel-details-atom-power-scheme
Free phones from T-Mobile for Fathers Day
Jun 16th
T-Mobile Deal Page
Looks like T-Mobile is playing serious. Click on the image to sign up or just go to http://deals.t-mobile.com/. I use Verizon but this is a great deal and a nice way to get one of the new smart phones.