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Suppose you want to execute a Statement that someone hands you. (If it's a plain Statement , then at a minimum you'll also need the SQL to execute , along with maybe some other metadata.) Next, you might think you need to know whether it's a query (does it return a ResultSet , you might think?) or some hazy kind of non-query update thing (maybe it changes some rows?). You don't. Any supposedly…
In the spirit of this blog where I want to write without getting blocked, here are some disjointed notes on annotation processing in Java. First, read one of the best descriptions of rounds and such I've ever read. To raise an error that will be "seen" by RoundEnvironment#errorRaised() , print the right kind of message . This goes hand-in-hand with the multi-round nature of annotation processing.…
I've just read the absolute fever dream that is Steve Yegge's Gas Town . The irony here is that a Gas Town built on even slightly more rigorous "manual" foundations would probably be a game-changer in certain enormo-tech enterprises. One of the things I like about this exercise, however, is that it cheerfully acknowledges the hyperinflationary nature of burning cash to build software at exorbitant…
The Java Language Specification sometimes uses invocation in the context of a type . That was surprising enough to me that I searched the specification to see if, for example, " invocation of Class " is defined anywhere in the specification. It is not. It is however used in the generics tutorial , written by Gilad Bracha, one of the architects of Java's generics, where it is written that an…
I wanted to capture this before I lost the thread. The relationships among types and elements in the Java language model classes is (to me) extraordinarily complicated, but reasonably precise and useful. So it seems to warrant some exposition. The notation above is, for the most part, bog-standard UML. Note that these are objects, not classes. I've chosen arbitrarily to represent TypeMirror…
This is the first musing of maybe many on the fundamentals of (Java-based) dependency injection (DI) systems. In a DI system, the system has to issue requests to acquire object references denoted by (usually) annotations. It seems to me there are two kinds of these requests. One kind is: some "mother" Java object is in the process of being built for some reason. To build it, its references…
I'm trying out this blog platform and want to make it a place where I err on the side of too little editing rather than too much. I used to write a lot. Not so much anymore and I want to change that. Posts here may be very short, or may be longer reads. There may be ten a day, or zero. Expect technical (mostly Java) and music talk, mostly. No post, including this one, will reflect anything about…