What's Cooking in Java 8 - Project Jigsaw

What is Project Jigsaw: Project Jigsaw is the project to make the java compiler module aware. For years java API has been monolithic, i.e. the whole API was seen from any part of the code equally. There has also not been any way to declare a code's dependency on any other user libraries. Project Jigsaw attempts to solve these problems along with others in a very eligant way. In this article, I will highlight the basic concepts of Jigsaw module systems and also explain how it would work with the commands so as to provide a real feel of it. Currently, Jigsaw is targetted to be included in the release of Java 8. In my opinion, this is a change bigger than generics that came with verion 5 of java platform.

What's Cooking in Java 8 - Project Lambda

What is project lambda: Project lambda is the project to enable lambda expressions in java language syntax. Lambda expressions are major syntax in functional programming languages like lisp. Groovy would be the closest relative of java that has support for lambda expressions, also known as closures.

Java Generics Capture Conversion

Introduction: Earlier in my article Java Compile Time Method Binding I had promised to explain how type arguments are inferred during invocation of a generic method. However, that would not be of that use without learning how capture conversion works first. So what is capture conversion. Capture conversion is the type conversion when a reference of a generic type is created by passing the type parameters. Its not really that complicated. But it still does require some attention. Note that capture conversion is only required for compile time type checking, nothing is there in the compiled code and nothing happens at runtime.

Fundamental Semantics of Extensible Business Reporting Language Dimensions

Introduction: In my previous article, I have discussed a broad overview of the concepts of XBRL dimensions. Today I am going to discuss about the semantics of XBRL dimensions. Hope you enjoy reading. This article assumes that the reader has gone through the former article here.

Fundamentals of Extensible Business Reporting Language Dimensions

What is XBRL dimensions: XBRL dimensions specification is a modular extension for the XBRL specification. It uses the segment and scenario elements of the context to use the elements defined in it to divide the data according to dimensions, as I will explain shortly. The dimension specification is too big to be fully covered in a single article, so in this, I will only discuss the fundamentals and in another, I will explain the other syntactic details. Since the article assumes the reader's prior knowledge of XBRL, the reader is advised to first read the articles on XBRL here.

Java Compile Time Method Binding

Introduction: It appears to be a simple process to determine which method a particular method invocation refers to, but it still needs pages of documentation in the java language specification to address this, especially to take care of auto-boxing/auto-unboxing and variable arguments. In this article, I will highlight how an actual method is bound at compile time to a particular method invocation.

Manipulating Java Class Files with ASM 4 - Part Two: Tree API

What is ASM tree API: ASM Tree API is the part of ASM that lets you create/modify the class in memory. The class is viewed as a tree of information. Like the whole class is an instance of ClassNode, which contain a list of FieldNode objects, a list of MethodNode objects etc. This article assumes that the reader has already read the first part here.