IcedTea\'s OpenJDK Passes Java Test Compatibility Kit

Tag : RAM Compatibility


Logging is a quasi-identical to Apache's log4j, indeed this causedbad feelings among log4j's authors who felt Sun should just haveofficialized their API. Of course the reason Sun used it as an(ahem) inspiration is that it's very good, as demonstrated by theabsolutely huge number of projects using it. And you know as wellas I do that rolling out your own is a common developer trait,*especially* for trivial things like that.

NIO is brilliant. If it's too complex or low-level for you, justuse the "old IO", which is *also* good - just not as low-level.

Swing, I can understand your feeling. Although the real problemwith Swing is not "bloat" as in unnecessary complex andfeaturefull, it's that even though it only shipped in a JDK with1.2 (which had the Collection framework), Sun bowed toshort-sighted morons who kicked a fuss when it was suggested thatit be put in java.swing (instead of javax.swing), and as a resultstill uses the old Vector and so on.

Generally speaking, what you call "bloat" is due to:
- the presence of libraries *you* don't use. Guess what, otherpeople do.
- the provision for extensions. For instance, the java.net packageis chock full of factories, abstract classes and interfaces thatyou seem to disdain. And indeed to 98% of developers who just useit for the net, that's all pretty pointless. The upshot is thatshould you require Unix or X25 sockets, you can still use the sameAPI - I've seen it done. Sure you have to write the C code, but theJava code is all the same except the bit that gets the address. Howmany open-source language don't even have a common low-level DBAPI, forcing you to write you own single use abstraction layer whenyou need to target several DBs? At least with Java you know it'sJDBC. Always.

Sun's attitude towards libraries has always been, as far as Java isconcerned at least, make the simple easy, make the difficultpossible. To me that's good design. Of course it means that easycan be more complex than with more specific APIs.