cyranoVR's Journal: The Java Mindset

When many people describe Java, they often focus on its object-oriented nature. In the last year of coding, I've seen that the Java mindset is much more than object-oriented design and patterns.

What is the Java mindset about?

1) Internationalization

When you are writing code for text parsing and sorting code, you should stop and think "what charset?" When you are printing a date or monetary value to a user, you should think "what locale?" When you are designing a web site, you should plan for it to be in multiple languages. Java provides answers to these problems.

2) Rich Libraries

This one comes straight out of Effective Java - whenever you find yourself writing elementary code (searching, sorting, data structures, etc.) you stop yourself and check if it already exists in the Java SDK. The Java SDK provides a rich set of libraries - and if you don't see what you need, just Google it or check the Jakarta Commons.

3) Team Development

Java is a language designed for Team programming. Java's strong typing ensures that changes that break a build are immediately apparent. Appropriately (verbosely) named classes and methods ensure that code is readable and self-documenting, even if coders do not use Java's built-in documentation system, JavaDoc.

4) Engineered Applications

By design, Java is a language requires discussion, thought and planning. Its strongly-typed and interface-driven nature require that developers plan application, package and class design in advance. In other languages, Lone Wolf coders often seek to save themselves a few keystrokes by hacking up classes "on the fly." Java's built-in compile time checks prevents extra hours of debugging that can result from one coder's misguided shortcut.

excellent

[btlzu2]

however, if you're implying priority with numerical ordering, i'd perhaps re-order it thus:

1) Engineered Applications
2) Internationalization
3) Team Development
4) Rich Libraries

While I really like Java's libraries, many other languages have rich libraries. I think a case could be made that one of the primary features are the facilities for fairly cleanly engineered applications--and, of course, its object oriented nature goes hand-in-hand in this category.

Internationalization is vital. People take for gran