Wednesday February 15, 2006
Mustang Opens Kimono on javac
Filed under: javase6
In a previous post about my *heart* of NetBeans, I talked about javac taking a nap due to the helpful code checking syntax and reference errors, and associated squiggles that NetBeans was doing for me.
Sleep no more ! javac is about to get busier than ever.
In fact of course, as was pointed out to me by one of our experts (thankyou Jonathan), javac is behind all those squiggly lines qand helpful messages. No wonder the message text is invariably exactly consistent with what one would see in a compilation. Isn't it nice when things are simple and consistent like that ? Its the sunshine and birdsong of good user experience. How reassuring software is when it does what you expect it do to do. And how clever of those Netbeans folks to adapt a version of javac to do it.
No good idea goes unpunished of course: the Mustang version of J2SE, the beta version of which you can get as of this morning, gives you a similar degree of control over (anybody's implementation of) javac, with the addition of the Compiler APIs. Want to do your own code syntax checking ? Want to dynamically compile a dynamically written class, load and instantiate it in the same runtime ? Pretty cool, huh ? By the way, everyone say hello to the JSP and PHP container developers; I imagine they are pleased its finally here in the platform.
It makes even a grumpy ex-Smalltalker like me smile. Maybe I'll be able to write all my code just ahead of the debug breakpoint soon...
javac, sleep no more !
Posted by dannycoward ( Feb 15 2006, 10:26:03 AM PST ) Permalink
