Category Archives: Java

grotag

Lots of Amiga documentation was in the AmigaGuide format. These are simple ASCII documents with some rudimentary markup to turn them into hypertext, working something like TeXInfo manuals. Think more like a markdown-enabled Gopher than the web though: you can … Continue reading

Posted in Amiga, Java | Leave a comment

So, what’s the plan? Part 1: what WAS the plan?

No CEO dominated a market without a plan, but no market was dominated by following the plan. — I made this quote up. Let’s say it was Rockefeller or someone. In Accidental Tech Podcast 385: Temporal Smear, John Siracusa muses … Continue reading

Posted in AAPL, Java, WebObjects | Tagged | 1 Comment

Java By Contract: a Worked Example

Java by Contract is an implementation of Design by Contract, as promoted by Bertrand Meyer and the Eiffel Software company, for the Java programming language. The contract is specified using standard Java methods and annotations, making it a more reliable … Continue reading

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Updates to JavaByContract

Some improvements to JavaByContract, the design-by-contract tool for Java: Preconditions, Postconditions and Invariants now appear in the Javadoc for types that use JavaByContract. While this is only a small source change, it’s a huge usability improvement, as programmers using your … Continue reading

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Research Watch, and Java by Contract

I introduced Java by Contract, a tool for building design-by-contract style invariants, preconditions and postconditions in Java using annotations. It’s MIT licensed, contributions are welcome, and I hope this helps lots of people to introduce stronger correctness checking into your … Continue reading

Posted in academia, Java, OOP | Leave a comment

HotSwift

A few places have linked to Apple’s use of Swift in iOS, it’s useful to put it in context. How much of Solaris was made out of Java? Almost none. There was a web browser that you’ve never heard of … Continue reading

Posted in AAPL, Java | 2 Comments

Like Java, only functional

An idea that clarified itself to me in discussion today is that Swift is to Functional Programming as Java is to Object-Oriented Programming: it is the thing that lets you write C and pretend you’ve adopted some posh-sounding “paradigmatic” non-imperative … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, Java | Leave a comment

It doesn’t take an Oracle to see that coming

Today has largely been brought to you by nostalgia brought about by this article, reporting on a get-together of former Sun Microsystems employees. I have never been a former Sun Microsystems employee, and of course now I never will be … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Java, UNIX | Comments Off on It doesn’t take an Oracle to see that coming

When single responsibility isn’t possible

This posted was motivated by Rob Rix’s bug report on NSObject, “Split NSObject protocol into logical sub-protocols”. He notes that NSObject provides multiple responsibilities[*]: hashing, equality checking, sending messages, introspecting and so on. What that bug report didn’t look at … Continue reading

Posted in Foundation, Java, ruby | Leave a comment

LLVM projects you may not be aware of

All Mac and iPhone OS developers must by now be familiar with LLVM, the Low-Level Virtual Machine compiler that Apple has backed in preference to GCC (presumably at least partially because because GCC 4.5 is now a GPLv3 project, in … Continue reading

Posted in C++, Java, objc | 27 Comments