AOP vs Java 7's closures, extension methods, type inference...

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:17:00 GMT

thoughts on Alex Miller's "Through the Java looking glass" (Dec 15, 2007)

Yesterday (Dec 14) Alex Miller posted "Through the Java looking glass", which brought up some interesting points regarding the new Java 7 additions to the language wondering aloud if Java 7 "is going to succeed in creating an environment that still makes sense or whether it will be just the ugly step-child of these ideas which are better executed in their own environments".

http://tech.puredanger.com/2007/12/14/through-the-java-looking-glass

As you may know Alex hosts the best site that follows all the Java 7 developments in one place over at at http://tech.puredanger.com/java7 So I took notice when Alex questioned these new features and realized that perhaps many of us are blinded by the "me too" rush for these features in Java 7.

I recall when Gregor Kiczales (father of AOP) and company gave one of the first AOP sessions at JavaOne 2000 and have too wondered why AOP did not catch on with developers and why only now is prevalent in frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, etc. Likewise I presented an OSGi session at that same JavaOne 2000 and suggested using OSGi not just for home automation but as the basis for enterprise application development only to see it now be touted as a "new technology" by some and available in frameworks like Spring.

So will Java 7 closures (for example) follow a similar path? Will developers make use of these retrofitted features in Java 7 en masse or will it initially be adopted by framework developers like Neil Gafter's closures protoyype example as applied to Doug Lea's Fork/Join concurrency framework? Or will developers continue to move to other languages that are more suited for these features like Scala, Groovy, etc.

Assuming Neil's closures proposal wins out and I think it looks likely because James Gosling pretty much stated as such, pointing out how it should have been all or nothing in the first place (with regard to anonymous classes), will the ugly static types in the closures syntax scare off developers? Alex points out in a follow up comment that it is best described by Josh Bloch's JavaPolis presentation this past week:

http://www.javac.info/bloch-closures-controversy.ppt

Update: Neal responds to Joshua's criticism: http://gafter.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-flavor-of-closures.html

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AOP vs Java 7's closures, extension methods, type inference...