Martin @ Blog

Dutch version can be found at the Finalist IT Group weblog.

Since the start of the development of JDK 7, there is quite some discussion on the API’s in the standard Java libraries which covers date and time. In the current Java version (1.6) there are roughly three major (groups of) classes which are responsible for handling date and time: Date and Calendar, the formatting classes, and the classes in the java.sql package, including java.sql.Date, java.sql.Time and java.sql.Timestamp. Most developers agree that these classes are far from perfect.

In order to resolve this issue, JSR-310 is started to improve the date and time API in the standard Java libraries. However, due to lack of developers and slow progress, it became very uncertain if the JSR would be ready for inclusion in JDK 7 (which will eventually become Java 7, the name I will use in the rest of this article). JSR-310 is lead by Stephan Colebourne and Michael Nascimento Santos. Colebourne is the original author of the increasingly popular Joda Time project, which is a replacement for the default Java date and time API’s. At Devoxx 2009, taking place last November, Mark Reinhold of Sun announced that Java 7 will be delayed until September 2010 at the earliest. Stephan Colebourne sees this as a opportunity to release at least a partially complete JSR-310 in time for the upcoming Java release. (more…)

One of the nice things of Scala is the availability of a command line interpreter based on the REPL principle (Read-evaluate-print loop). Last week, for a particular project, I wanted to generate a string containing a part of the UTF-8 character table.
Thanks to Scala’s concise syntax, this would not be very difficult:

(0x20AC until 0x20B6).foreach { x => print(x.toChar + " ") }

This example will print characters 0×20AC (euro symbol) up to 0×20B6 (an unknown symbol to me ).

However, the result I got on my system (Mac OS X 10.6.2 using Scala 2.8 nightly) was not really what I expected:

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

(more…)

My weblog was not very active lately. Mostly, this is because I’m posting a lot on Twitter (in Dutch however) and post some articles on the weblog of the company I’m working for. Especially the post on Devoxx is an interesting read in my opinion.

However, I’m planning to change this. It is not that I don’t like writing, and in my experience, when I write an article on a specific subject, I have the habit of do some research on it which increase my knowledge on the subject on the go. I have some articles in draft and some others planned to write. With the new year approaching, increased writing sounds like a good intention for the upcoming year.

In order to mark this change, I’ve decided to change the look of my site a bit and add some additional features on it (especially a Mobypicture widget). The new look is not yet finished, but that will come over time.

So, if anybody is visiting this weblog (probably that aren’t many people anymore, partly because I didn’t post anything recently…) they definitely noticed that I was a victim of one of the many exploits that are available for Wordpress weblogs. The frontpage looked alright, but if one tried to view a single post or clicked some random link on my weblog, the page didn’t work. Of course, I was running an old version of Wordpress (2.5 actually…). (more…)

Java 7: new developments and rumours

As promised in my last post, I will write some more on the Java 7 developments. Since my last post, there are not that many new developments, but since I’m reading a bit more on the subject there are some things I want to mention here. (more…)

Last week, I wrote an article for our corporate weblog on the development of Java 7. Since the article was in Dutch, I didn’t post it on my personal blog. But I wanted to post some follow ups, and since it is not very easy to do this on the weblog of Finalist, I decided to translate the article to English and post it here. The translation is done pretty quickly, and thus very likely a bit rough on the edges. I think it is also interesting for non-Dutch readers. (more…)

In my opinion, most of the stuff on YouTube is not very interesting. However, today I stumbled upon a post on Slashdot which contains a link to a really inspiring video created by somebody with a lot of time, but most of all, a very creative and musical mind. What he does, basically, is gathering music-related video’s from YouTube and edit them in such a way that a new song is created. You should watch some of these:

There are at least six others, just take a look here: http://www.youtube.com/user/kutiman. All the original video’s are linked as well.

Today Apple introduced the first beta version of Safari 4. While I didn’t read much about this new upcoming browser, I am really enthusiastic about the new features of this browser. I was waiting for Google Chrome to come to the Mac, since I really like lightweight browsers, but Safari made the waiting unnecessary. (more…)

I wrote this article a while ago, but never published it. Since it is mostly finished, I decided to put it online anyway. Unfortunately it is in Dutch, maybe I will translate it into English in the near future. (more…)

Each year during the middle of December, the European Java community gathers at Antwerp to get updated on the latest developments in their profession. This year, Devoxx was organised for the first time from 8 until 12 December. The event was sold out for the second time in a row. This contradiction is caused by the fact that Devoxx until this year was known under the name JavaPolis, but due to a dispute with regards to the Java brand, the name was changed into Javox and finally to Devoxx. In this post I will give my impressions of two days of this event. A Dutch version of this post is available at the weblog of my employer. (more…)