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Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:04:23 +0100
From: John Haxby <jch@scalix.com>
To: java-dev@lucene.apache.org
Message-ID: <44980E77.6060803@scalix.com>
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Subject: Re: Results (Re: Survey: Lucene and Java 1.4 vs. 1.5)
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Robert Engels wrote:
> To set the record straight, I think the Lucene product and community are
> fantastic. Period.
>   
Ditto.
> [snip]
> After almost 2 years I now back the move. Why? Several reasons:
>
> 1. Sun is very slow, if at all to fix bugs in 1.4 (of which there are many).
> For example, the current problems in Lucene regarding ThreadLocals. Although
> this is not a bug per se, it is probably not intuitive or desired behavior.
> The Lucene developers have been forced to both diagnose and create
> workarounds "problems" already fixed in 1.5. The licensing of Java does not
> allow for the easy fix bugs by non-Sun developers.
> 2. The type safe collections are far more efficient to program/debug with.
> 3. The standardized concurrent facilities can be of great benefit to
> multithreaded programs.
> 4. It is what students graduating from college understand and use.
> 5. It is what the currently available books explain and use.
>   
For my money (2) is the most important reason for moving to 1.5.   My 
early years (!) involved a lot of work with programming languages and 
finally having type-safe collections and the syntactic conventions that 
go along with those immediately struck me as a good step forward.   That 
first impression was borne out when I converted some of my java code to 
use the 1.5 type-safe constructs.   Not only was the code shorter and 
more understandable (aka more maintainable) but it brought to light some 
bugs that had lain their dormant for quite a while.

Lucene is well-tested and stable and written by better people better at 
writing Java than me so it's unlikely that there'll be any bugs like 
that lurking in dark corners.  On the other hand, new code stands a 
better chance of being bug free precisely because of the improvements in 
the language and the improved type-safety.

(3) comes second for me though -- I'm a big fan of Doug Lea's 
util.concurrent classes and having them well integrated in Java 1.5 
makes them even better, but that's the operating system personality talking.

jch

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