Bio
Gavin King is a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat. He's the creator of Hibernate, a popular persistence solution for Java and of the Ceylon programming language. He contributed to the Java Community Process as JBoss and then Red Hat representative for the EJB and JPA specifications and as spec lead and author of the CDI specification. He's currently a major contributor to the design of Jakarta Data and Jakarta Persistence. He lives in Barcelona with his wife and three daughters. His active interests include theoretical physics and quantum technologies.
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Linda has written up the new typesafe query API. I previously blogged the reasoning behind this stuff here and here.
Google and Spring are proposing a JSR to standardize a set of dependency injection related annotations. I've been asked by several people to comment on this and how it relates to JSR-299.
JSR-299 presentation
I just got done presenting on JSR-299 at the SDC conference in Gotenborg, Sweden. Here's the latest slide set[1]!
JSR-299 Public Review Draft approved by EC
The revised Public Review Draft of Contexts and Dependency Injection (JSR-299, the spec formerly known as Web Beans) was approved by the EC with all EC members voting Yes, except for Nortel and SpringSource who did not vote.
A revised public draft of JSR-299 is now available. This draft was produced with input from several people from the EE 6 expert group and aims to address a number of criticisms surrounding the relationship between 299 and the rest of the EE platform.
Horizon-expanding blogs
Two of my favorite blogs are The Volokh Conspiracy, written by a bunch of libertarianish legal academics, and Language Log, about linguistics. I really enjoy seeing how folks from very different disciplines reason and express themselves in writing (lawyers in particular are especially clear thinkers). This morning I started wondering if I'm missing out on other equally great groupblogs.
Unbest practices
I had fun reading this. The author degenerates into relativism toward the end, but the core point of the article is spot on: the phrase best practice
is one that is used by bullies and the intellectually incurious to avoid having to evaluate novel solutions upon their own merits. It's an appeal to authority that sidesteps the nasty requirement of having to actually state any actual authority.
Web Beans Interview on InfoQ
XML configuration in Web Beans
There's been plenty of discussion in the JPA group about my typesafe criteria proposal. My new favorite feature of the Java language is javax.annotation.Processor. Java 6 annotation processors are derived from the APT tool that existed in JDK 5, but are built into javac. Really, the name annotation processor is misleading, since this feature is only incidentally related to annotations. The Processor is really a fairly general purpose compiler plugin. If, like me, you've never been a fan of code generation, now is the time to reconsider. A Java 6 Processor can:
