And here I was thinking these airport towers run COBOL.
You could say Java is the new COBOL :)
Javapocalypse
11–20 of 129 posts
Re: Javapocalypse
#12This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that.
Creating the UI was easy enough, but making an HTTP response was hell. The simplest HTTP GET took around 30 lines of code, and the compiler kept complaining about unhandled exceptions (I know the URL is fine, it's a fixed string I can see, it's not going to throw MalformedURLException, I don't want to catch it, thank you. What? I can't compile without it?). Wrapping the calls up in try/catch blocks was easy enough (if a bit verbose), but now the variable only existed in that scope.
I know I'm new enough that I can't form an opinion about the language, but I know that something that has as simple an interface as an HTTP GET call shouldn't take 30 lines of boilerplate to do. I'm wondering how people deal with this issue (I'm guessing it's a lack of a good standard library?). What attracts people to the Java world? Is it the tooling (Eclipse was, admittedly, very good about auto-fixing my mistakes). Is the verbosity just "the way it is", or am I doing something wrong?
Re: Javapocalypse
#13This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
Verbosity is Java's middlename. That said, 3rd party libraries can get you a long way.
Re: Javapocalypse
#14This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
>What attracts people to the Java world?
Portability, security (automatic memory, static typing, etc.): you cannot bore a hole in your feet when shoving a nail. And backed by a huge company. Relatively fast. More reasons there: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyJavaIsGreat
>exception-related problems
A common hack it to wrap your code in a dumb try/catch block at the uppermost level. That way there is no scope-related problem and the compiler won't complain. Ofc that should only been done in a situation such as yours, not in "real life" (i.e. "entreprise world" for java).
Re: Javapocalypse
#15This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
Which API were you using? Java's HttpUrlConnection is notoriously badly designed [0] On Android (and elsewhere of course) you can use Apache's HttpClient instead which is a bit less horrible [1]. Part of this problem is checked vs unchecked exceptions, and some of the older APIs in Java use checked exceptions too heavily, IMHO. On top of that, I think all the Java IO stuff provides a pretty leaky abstraction over the system calls.
I had a somewhat long discussion with a colleague about this over the past year, and we looked at all the error cases in the C standard library and came to the conclusion the Java API was probably throwing checked exceptions in one or two corner cases where it should throw unchecked runtime exceptions. I'd be curious what other people think about this. I think specifically, I was asking him (a more Sr. engineer who has used Java heavily and considers it basically good) why closing an IO stream in a finally block throws another checked exception.
In short, I don't think you're doing anything wrong.
[0] See this, but I should caveat this with saying it's a bad API as designed to be consumed by an application. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/01/17/HttpURLCon...
[1] http://developer.android.com/reference/org/apache/http/clien...
Re: Javapocalypse
#16This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
Did you pull in a library to do the HTTP work or just use the raw HttpURLConnection?
I agree checked exceptions are annoying, though I have kind of grown to like them since they force me to think about failure cases.
You're going to hate this answer, but honestly, after you do Java for awhile the lines of code just become noise you don't notice... it's like reading and writing XML by hand; kinda sucks, but eventually you just stop noticing.
Re: Javapocalypse
#17This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
Which API were you using? Java's HttpUrlConnection is notoriously badly designed [0] On Android (and elsewhere of course) you can use Apache's HttpClient instead which is a bit less horrible [1]. Part of this problem is checked vs unchecked exceptions, and some of the older APIs in Java use checked exceptions too heavily, IMHO. On top of that, I think all the Java IO stuff provides a pretty leaky abstraction over the…
I started using HttpClient, but I saw a blog post that said that HttpURLConnection should be used by all new apps, so I went with that. I can't tell you about checked vs unchecked exceptions, as I just found out about them a minute ago.
In the end, I used this excellent library: http://loopj.com/android-async-http/
It's asynchronous, but it still required the work to be done in an AsyncTask, which is odd to me (why spawn a thread to spawn another thread?), but it wouldn't work in the main thread, and Android was good enough to tell me about it.
I'm glad that I'm not doing anything wrong, but I'm also sad because I was hoping I was doing something wrong. Thanks for your reply!
Re: Javapocalypse
#18This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
>What attracts people to the Java world? Portability, security (automatic memory, static typing, etc.): you cannot bore a hole in your feet when shoving a nail. And backed by a huge company. Relatively fast. More reasons there: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyJavaIsGreat > exception-related problems A common hack it to wrap your code in a dumb try/catch block at the uppermost level. That way there is no scope-related probl…
I think the last two reasons are the most important ones, as the first to are relatively common.
About the try/catch, it sounds like something that'll come back to bite me in the ass, so it's a bit unfortunate that I have to pick between being verbose and handling exceptions that can never occur, or being terse and hacky...
Re: Javapocalypse
#19This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
Did you pull in a library to do the HTTP work or just use the raw HttpURLConnection? I agree checked exceptions are annoying, though I have kind of grown to like them since they force me to think about failure cases. You're going to hate this answer, but honestly, after you do Java for awhile the lines of code just become noise you don't notice... it's like reading and writing XML by hand; kinda sucks, but eventually…
I used this in the end: http://loopj.com/android-async-http/, it exposes an interface that does not make me shudder, and I am guessing that is a very good thing.
I should read about checked exceptions more, I don't currently understand the difference between checked and unchecked.
I don't hate that answer, I was just hoping it wouldn't come to that :P Getting used to a language to get one's job done is fine, but it's not something that would cause one to fall in love with said language...
Re: Javapocalypse
#20This is irrelevant, but I just had my first Java experience yesterday. I decided to make an Android app, it's a simple remote control for hobby projects (Raspberry Pi/etc) that gives you a customizable UI with buttons that perform API calls. It'd be pretty simple to do in Python, which is the language I am proficient in, but Android development sounds fun so I wanted to get started in that. Creating the UI was easy e…
Verbosity is Java's middlename. That said, 3rd party libraries can get you a long way.
It looks like it, I just wish that the most frequently used libraries were standard in the language. That said, it's really magical for me to write something that runs natively on my phone, so it's still lots of fun.