slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

I gave a presentation today to team 2601 on some topics that will be useful for next year
- Java Micro Edition vs Java Standard Edition
- Changes in Java 5-8 that we are most likely to use
- Intro to Eclipse/tips

The deck is available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/boyarsky/j...-8-and-eclipse

I did this based on the announcement at Championship last year that we will be using Java 8 SE and Eclipse for the 2014-2015 season. Sharing on Chief Delphi in case anyone else finds it useful.

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

Here's a video of the presentation.
Thanks again to Jeanne and Danny for their work, and Ian Sun for the video.

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

Very nice. Thank you! I will be sharing this.

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

The alpha testing is currently using Eclipse Kepler with the Java 8 SE embedded JRE on the roboRIO. Not being a java expert, I'm not sure what additional java 8 support Eclipse Luna supports, or what the plans would be to support which version for FRC.

enums are the thing I miss most that is not included in Java ME

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

Thanks Ian for the video! I've linked from the slideshare site to the video. Youtube says I can't add a comment for 20 minutes because it is doing maintenance to my account. I'll add the link in that direction when it finishes.

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

Eclipse Kepler supports Java 7 syntax. You can use Java 8 libraries with Kepler. What you can't use is new Java 8 syntax. Which is just functional programming/lambdas. I wouldn't expect that to come during alpha or beta testing anyway. Largely because FIRST said they want to preserve as much backward compatibility to the APIs as they can next year. Which implies they aren't changing them to use functional programming APIs! I could see it coming up if a team is writing a complex algorithm and wants to call some built in APIs for that.

Professionally, I'm excited about functional programming. For FRC, I'm much more excited about Java SE and various features added in Java 5 and 7. That and the fact that we aren't using NetBeans next year!

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

That, and generics. Its amazing how much you take those things for granted until you no longer have them.

I am very much looking forward to an updated Java and all of the little toys that come with it.

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

Well said. We were trying to write some Networking code last year. When a student asked me a question, I said "why don't you just call the X class." Oh yeah. Because we can't.

Re: slides on updates to java and eclipse
 

Some of the stuff that is recommended I would argue is generally discouraged in terms of common practice (Though Common Practice does tend to fall away in the rush of programming between matches) but I think this is a good overview.

Also quick note, Eclipse Kepler CAN support Java 8 syntax, although you have to search for it in the Eclipse Marketplace and it works only after a certain build so either way I would recommend updating to Eclipse Luna.

Although WPILib wont be refactored and updated to Java 1.8 for the 2015 season I think this is a great move up. I sorely miss Enum's, Generics and all the IO and NIO utilities (Also all the missing Collections!) I have come to love. Plus that means I can port some of my libraries more easily to FRC Code now! Networking will come back to being easier to implement and maintain and all the 1.7 Libraries will be opened, always a plus. Something I am curious about is if JNI will work with the cRIO and using the JNIGen library will make it easier to test allowing for some time and memory consuming processes to be shared between Java and Native Memory.

Still, could Reflection become a problem? I mean altering internal variable at will seems like it could result in unexpected behavior, even as to unexpected behavior returning to the FMS. Of course I am sure it is just common sense to not mess around too much with the WPILib Internal Variables. Just putting it out there.