Chakra Yadavalli

A few weeks ago, I started experimenting with J2SE 5.0 "Tiger" and Eclipse 3.1M1. My first impression of Tiger was that its features are motivated by the claims of .NUTs: "Java code is very verbose whereas Language X's code is shorter and sweeter!" To calm them down, Tiger brings lots of conveniences to the J2SE 5.0 programmer - viz., auto-boxing, static imports, enums, varargs, enhanced for loop, generics, and concurrent utils. Though the concepts behind these features are not new to programming in general, their implementation in J2SE 5.0 is intriguing because these features are being added after the fact and need to be backwards compatible with pre-Tiger Java code. So, I wanted to explore these new features, one at a time, to understand the problems of pre-Tiger Java, learn how they were solved by Tiger and highlight any fine print or pit falls that come bundled ... (more)

Tiger (J2SE 5.0) Tips: Auto-boxing and Auto-unboxing - 2 "Gotchas"

First, let's take another look at the printf snippet. If you are using the Eclipse 3.1M1 or Eclipse 3.0/Cheetah0.0.6 workspace, it would have probably given a compile error that the class java.io.PrintStream has no method that corresponds to printf(String, int, int, int). This is because the required Tiger features are not yet supported by Eclipse. However, our Ant build file successfully compiles the code as it uses uses JDK 1.5.0 compiler. int i = 0; System.out.printf("%d %d %d", ++i, ++i, ++i); // Eclipse 3.1M1 shows compile error. In order to understand how variable argument me... (more)

Java 5.0 - Tiger: A Classic printf Snippet from the Past

I just downloaded J2SE 1.5/5.0 "Tiger" Beta and started playing with it. First, I could not get the Cheetah and the Tiger to play together. For those who joined the game late (like me), Cheetah is the early preview of Eclipse's future support for J2SE 1.5. It is is not part of the Eclipse 3.0 release. If anyone got these two cubs in a cage and under control, please leave a comment or at least a link to how to make these two get along. Thanks in advance. After a usual, HelloWorld program, I wanted to explore the new printf feature of the java.io.PrintStream. Given that this is adv... (more)