From discussions about the previous weblog entry, I've realized that Collection, Iterator (and Iterable) are all attempts to unify access to containers. Each has strengths and weaknesses, which is probably why we need more than one way to do it.

Everything I know about programming in bullet form.

According to the Design Patterns book (aka GoF), the intent of the Iterator pattern is to "Provide a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation." Or more simply, an iterator unifies access to containers.

YAGNI stands for "You aren't going to need it", and is a fundamental anti-principle of the Agile software development philosophy. However designs which plan for change are not YAGNI's.

This article gives you a simple trick you can use to make your Java method calls more readable when the list of parameters contains booleans and numeric primitives.

For Thinking in Java 4e, I'm trying to analyze the presence of the Collections interface in java.util.

The next Heron release will be replacing the interface construct with the concept construct.

Why don't open source developers just put their code into the public domain?

This article is my end-of-show wrap up, with notes on a variety of announcements and things. It compares Groovy to BeanShell, describes great new announcements like AJAX and Hibernate, and takes a look at a radically new concept that was a major theme of the show--EASE OF USE enhancements coming up in J2EE, NetBeans, and Java Studio Creator.

YARD, the compile-time recursive descent parser generation framework has spwaned its first offspring, Biscuit.

I have decided to focus my energies on making sure the next version of Heron is a lot more practical. I have decided to put aside some of my more ambitious features and return to the basics of a succesful language: tools, libraries, and ease of use.

Ken Arnold just posted a blog entry describing how difficult he found generics when working on the upcoming edition of The Java Programming Language book.

Distributed development is a way of life anymore, especially for an open source project. But remote collaboration has been an essentially unsolved problem, most notably when it comes to specification and design. The upcoming release of NetBeans promises to tackle that problem in a very big way--and you'll benefit, even if you don't use NetBeans.

You go to JavaOne in hopes of hearing about realy cool things. Every once in a while, you get something extremely cool--elegant, even--something like Project Jackpot. If you need to clean up your source files en masse, do it elegantly, and do it quickly, then Jackpot is the tool you've been waiting for.

Groovy is a Java-compatible scripting language that blends features from Ruby, Python, and Smalltalk. If you need robust ANT scripts, super shell scripts, or want to write fast unit tests, you may want to try something Groovy, for a change.