Google Donates Windowbuilder, Codepro To Eclipse 150
h00manist writes "Google is donating Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro Profiler to the Eclipse project. 'Google acquired the software when it bought Instantiations, relaunching the Java graphical user interface building tool Windowbuilder Pro shortly after. Now the outfit has decided to donate both Windowbuilder Pro and the code analysis tool Codepro to the open source Eclipse project. Although Google has announced its intention to donate the software, it needs go through a rigorous filtering process to ensure that no intellectual property rights will be breached. Once those formalities are dealt with, it is likely that both Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro will tip up in the Indigo release of Eclipse sometime in June 2011.'"
Re:Does anybody still use Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Java getting on in years and in need of being replaced by something more modern?
no.
Re:Does anybody still use Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, people doing real low-level or time-critical work use assembler/C/C++, and people doing real high-level work don't go for a primitive imperative language which looks like C/C++ with training wheels.
Riiiiight. I wonder, where do people go who want to be able to find people to maintain their software for, say, a decade? Except for COBOL, of course... and that's going to get seriously expensive. (God, I really wish I was kidding about COBOL.)
Wake me up when one of the 'real high level' languages (whichever is your personal poison) has found a significant market and mind share. Meanwhile, I'll stick with whatever language fits the problem, instead of fitting the problem to my favourite language.
Re:Does anybody still use Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because Java is so much more verbose ;)
Ha (Score:2, Insightful)
It's Java. That's where my interest ends, especially after Google's own fight with Oracle.
Now if you do integrate a couple of decent C profiling tools, I'd be interested.
Re:Does anybody still use Java? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have modpoints but as no one bothered to reply to this post and point it's naive, fanboy inconsistencies then I felt the need to do that myself.
First, you've claimed the following:
If by "performance" you mean noticeable lag on your regular GUI operations then your comment is reasonable. The advances in the hardware world brought us in the last decade hardware powerful enough to run a GUI written even in the most bloated interpreted language you can find in a smooth enough way to not notice any lag any more. Yet, java still lags far behind languages such as C and C++ in performance, with some data crunching benchmarks running java at least twice as slow as the C++ program compiled with G++ [debian.org] and and also with the C program compiled with GCC [debian.org]. So, in the end what you said amounts to nothing more than claiming that writing programs in C or C++ instead of Java is rarely justifiable on the grounds of performance if and only if performance is irrelevant for the application you are developing.
Then you moved on to the OO paradigm, where you made another silly claim. You stated that
This statement is absurd. Do you happen to know what any C++ programmer must do in order to get all the methods in a class to be virtual? Well, he only needs to state that they are virtual. That is it. There is absolutely nothing in C++ that forces any class method to not be virtual. As a side note, not having a method to be virtual by default is a terribly useful feature, particularly in performance terms, as a method can be called without having to waste cycles checking up with a vtable to realize what method to call.
And just to drive the point home, which is that your comment regarding the implementation of the OO paradigm in Java Vs C++ doesn't make sense, let me just mention a single issue plaguing Java that C++ implements just fine: multiple inheritance. That, alone, is a big thorn in the side of the "Java's OO implementation is much better than C++", simply because it makes it just plain wrong.
Re:Does anybody still use Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
mention a single issue plaguing Java that C++ implements just fine: multiple inheritance
I had a good chuckle at that statement because in my experience, the *lack* of MI and operator overloading features is one of Java's biggest selling features. (I've worked at companies that had to make it a firing offense to use either in order to stop programmers from using these features.)
Both these features allow programmers to write elegant, stream-lined code... for themselves. Unfortunately, the guy maintaining the code who has neither the experience with the project nor the mental acuity of the original programmer to see the mental model that underlied the programmer's conception of the code then destroys everything.
In their defense, MI and operator overloading have probably protected many a programmer's job. "We can't lay off Jeff, he's the only one who will ever understand the code he wrote."
(Caveat: Of course it's *possible* to write maintainable code using these features, but it's like setting the speed limit to 120 mph - a lot more people *think* they can manage it than can actually manage it, and there's a lot of collateral damage along the way.)