Alef Arendsen

I blogged over at the JTeam blog about the upcoming Java Meetup, June 5th.

Hope to see you there!

Last few years, I’ve organized the Amsterdam Java Meetup on a (pretty much) quarterly basis. The last Java Meetup was somewhere late last year and I haven’t gotten around to planning anything since. It’s about time again, so here goes:

• What: beer, wine and snacks while discussing tech stuff
• When: March 13th, 2009, from 5.30pm onwards
• Where: Grand Cafe de Jaren, de Nieuwe Doelenstraat, Amsterdam ( http://tinyurl.com/bn5o2b )
• Why: because the first few beers will be free because it’s a nice happening and it’s good to meet each other once every now and then. Maybe we can all start complaining about the credit crunch or so…

Also, after having received many requests, I’ve started a Google Group for the Java Meetup. There, I’ll be announcing future dates for the Java Meetup. Well, I’ll also keep on doing it on this blog and some other places, but if you want to have the dates delivered right to your inbox, please subscribe to the Dutch Developer Meetup Google Group.

You might wonder why the Google Group is not called Amsterdam Java Meetup, but Dutch Developer Meetup instead. Well, I figured we might want to discuss other technologies as well from time to time, so although it still is named the Java Meetup, maybe I’ll just go and rename it somewhere in the future . Also, I don’t want to limit myself to Amsterdam. Maybe there’s a huge developer crowd in Loppersum that we haven’t heard of yet that needs bringing together, which means we have to organize a Loppersum Java Meetup…

In the meantime, if you have ideas about the meetup, want to join, or just want to give your comments, join the group!

Stephen Colebourne did his Future of the Java Language talk again at JavaEdge here in Israel. It’s a two-part talk where in the first part he higlights the current status of the Java language and how its development is progressing. In the second part he highlights 10 different features that might all classify as small language changes category Sun announced there are going to be for Java 7.

The list includes things as a loop status control construct, string interpolation, a construct similar to the C# using statement, an easier way to iterate over maps using the foreach statement and more.

Then he has people vote on the different changes highlighted during the session. This is interesting, because it allows people to express their opinion on things directly and of course, Stephen is publishing the results. Here at JavaEdge, I think several hundred people voted. I’ll leave the publication of the results from the vote here at JavaEdge in Tel Aviv to Mr. Colebourne himself. In the meantime, you can find the results from the vote at Devoxx here.

Stephen also mentioned that he’s happy to help out any user group or other gathering do the same vote. I guess that probably means sharing slides and so on. I think this is a good initiative as it helps Sun / the JCP decide which features to put in.

Eclipse on Leopard used to have a very nasty bug that made it to crash in certain circumstances. Now I just downloaded the main Eclipse distribution (I figured, it’s been a while, the main download SHOULD have fixed this now). And it still crashes.

Now, I’m sure it’ll be fixed in the next version, but what does it take to supply all people on Leopard with patched version (as the main download version).

Sure, I know the integration and stream builds all have the fix, but do I really have to go through all the trouble of downloading a stream integration build to get such a patch? What about people that just want to try things out and don’t know about this bug.

Of course, I could be totally wrong here and maybe there is a easily downloadable version for Leopard somewhere, but then I missed it. Let me know if you have any alternatives.

Okay, apart from Java 6 not being available on the Mac, I’m not complaining at all:

Last login: Thu Nov 15 10:06:52 on ttys000
Macintosh:~ alefarendsen$ which ant
/usr/bin/ant
Macintosh:~ alefarendsen$ which mvn
/usr/bin/mvn

I just got a new laptop and immediately installed Leopard on it. I was in such a rush that I really didn’t have time to do anything else than the bare necessities. So when I checked out some source code today and needed Ant to build it, I didn’t need to download it at all!

Thanks, Apple

And about that Java 6 thing: who’s on Java 6 anyway