Time and Resolvers
I'm trying to get to bed early, so I'll be brief.

I spent about an hour finishing off my timesheets today. It's amazing how slow Safari gets when it has to render as many widgets as the timesheet program creates. As a result, it is frustratingly slow to enter this data. So while waiting I killed a little time reading Slashdot.

The rest of the day was spent converting my old remote resolver code to the new SPI. Fortunately there appears to be very little which has changed.

My only concern is the method which requests a new transaction session. I'm not really sure of what to do with it, as no other methods use the XAResource object that is returned. For the moment I'll be returning a DummyXAResource (which was kindly supplied for me by SR) and using my own session objects. This will certainly work for tests, but then I will need to consider how the use these objects would impact on a resolver session.

Tomorrow I'll have to ask why we have a method that returns an XAResource object, but no methods which accept one.

Java 1.5
I took a little time to explain to AM some of the changes to the Java language in the new release. I didn't go into some of the non-language features (such as instrumentation) as I've yet to fully explore them.

Generics are nice (especially as I like the type safety of templates in C++), though he claims that some people have been complaining about some deficiencies in their implementation. Personally, I see the advantages of the new system outweighing any corresponding problems.

Autoboxing, for-each loops, and var-args are all syntactic conveniences, so they are not really anything to get excited over. They will certainly be handy though. Similarly, static imports will be useful, but again they just help tidy up the code.

The two standout syntactic improvements are annotations and enumerations.

The annotation system is very nice. The Sun example which annotates methods which are to be tested really demonstrates the power of this. Once this takes hold, JUnit testing will become much more powerful, and can eliminate all sorts of string comparisons used in reflection. I can see this extending into the definitions of MBeans for JMX, and other sorts of Java beans as well.

But my favourite addition is the new enumeration type. This allows the removal of the need to use integer identifiers, provides type safety, provides automatic toString methods for each element, and allows access to the entire range (and even subranges) of elements in the enumeration. It also allows for a user-defined constructor, and class specific methods to overload the behaviour of the type. It even permits the creation of and abstract method which each element implements to create custom behaviour. These are some very nice features, and will provide a significant saving in code when building up powerful enumerations types.

Unfortunately I won't be using much of this for some time. For a start, until Java 1.5 is also available on OSX then it can't be considered truly cross platform, and I won't be able to run it on my PowerBook anyway. Secondly, the wait until it is available on the Mac will be useful, as this should allow a significant enough period to have ironed out the bugs present in any x.0 release.

I didn't even have to mention these reasons to AM. I just said that there were two reasons I wouldn't be using it yet, and AM just named them without any input from me. Looks like I won't be the only one waiting then. I'm looking forward to it though.