Pi

"The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change."
- FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers

Article on closures

In its current issue the German Java Magazin has published an article I wrote on closures in Java as suggested by Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling and Peter von der Ahé. In this article I introduce the suggested spec for closures in Java and I also talk about how they can be used to modularize crosscutting concerns, comparing that approach to aspect-oriented programming (AOP).
The article is also available online (in German).

Blog Facelift

My blog got a facelift today. I am now using the new Blogger Layout feature. One of the things that allows me to do, apart from not having to mess with HTML code as much, is share interesting posts of the RSS feeds I read. With a single mouse click I can make them appear on the blog (see Paul's Blogroll).

Software Engineering Radio

In a recent episode of the Software Engineering Radio, Markus Völter asked the listeners to help them promote their podcast. Since I'm a more or less regular listener and I always like to help out wherever I can, this is what I have to say about SE radio:
The podcast is pretty interesting, its content is very technical, and it covers topics such as MDSD, SOA, or concurrency. The most recent episode is an interview with Guy Steele on Fortress. So if you're interested in these kind of topics, be sure to tune in!

    

Sorry, please, thank you

Some error messages are kind of funny, others are just ridiculous.

This is by far the friendliest error message I've seen in a long time. I really approve more friendliness (on both sides) in Human–computer interaction.

The F Word

Google Code Search can be quite useful for searching source code. This blog entry describes a different, but yet very interesting use of the search engine.

GWT

At this month's meeting of the Orange County Java User Group Dave Ford gave a presentation about GWT. Also, the Java Posse recently had an episode on this topic.
I like the idea of compiling Java code to JavaScript because it addresses two problems that JavaScript has: lack of tool support and poor scalability.
I had heard and read a few things about GWT before but there were still some things to learn:

• IntelliJ IDEA's support for GWT is really good which is useful because


• GWT involes at least some amount of boilerplate work.


• Instead of writing lines over lines of stuff like
  
Label label = new Label("Yeeha!");
label.setSize("100px", "10px");
rootPanel.add(label);
// etc.,

  I'd really like to have a nice GUI maker do this for me. I guess there are already a few of those out there that support GWT (1, 2), but I haven't had the chance yet to check them out.


• Finally, Google's widgets are not too numerous and they don't look very pretty out of the box, either. So a widget library like this one will probably prove useful as well.

Blog

I'm blogging about my stay in California here (in German).