studygroup, a weblog by George Girton

Eclipse . . . . . nov 14 2002 — sg4.dat

A rollicking good time was had by all as we discussed Library Idioms: Exceptions, and Language Idioms in Java. Demeter's rule of thumb popped up again as follows:Catch the exception at the point closest to the occurrence of the exception that allows execution to proceed in a stable way. No one disagreed with this.

The perennial discussion of when and why class fields and functions should be protected, public, or private led naturally to a very desirable innovation in Java, the "paranoid:" access control keyword. Fields which are declared as "paranoid" are not even accessible to the class in which they are defined. How their value is set, or accessed, remains to be determined.

Other topics mentioned but not fully explored in this Java Study Group meeting included Generic Java (previous week), dynamic proxies, GRASP method of responsibility-driven class design [Larman 1997], and SWT. SWT came up in the context of Eclipse (available now from Eclipse.org, which itself was the subject of boundless enthusiasm and hope.

Reference was again made to the Turing Tarpit, which is either a web page with a catalog of Bad Computer Languages or A literary reference from computer science or of course both.

Next time we will continue with our discussion of packaging idioms, which are dealt with in Chapter 12 of Java Performance and Idiom Guide buy at amazon.com by Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie. pools=XML, Blog, Ruby

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