From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-10-25T04:35:56+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: Is C# just Java renamed? WAS: IronRuby...will it be like J++?

John Lam (DLR) wrote:
> Charles.O.Nutter@sun.com [mailto:Charles.O.Nutter@sun.com]:
> 
>> John Lam (DLR) wrote:
>>> BTW, I'm fairly certain that you can't do this in Java today, but I
>> could be mistaken.
>>
>> Both are possible, along with other weird and wild things, through many
>> third-party libraries for Java and non-standard JVM extensions. The
>> difference is that they're not baked into standard Java, so they're
>> generally not thought of as features of Java. C# and .NET in general
>> include a lot of things as standard that are generally relegated to
>> third-party libraries (often several incarnations) on the Java
>> platform.
> 
> Wow. I had no idea that Java now has libraries that expose a generic query syntax that can be used over arbitrary data sources (in memory, database, web service data sources via custom providers). Do you support dynamic Intellisense for the data sources in the IDEs as well? Do you have a pointer to this?

Nothing so unified; there's a "linq-like" library that either 
preprocesses Java source or post-processes bytecode (I don't recall 
which) to allow embedding expression languages into the code. I believe 
it was posted on LtU a couple months back. I don't know if any more has 
been done with it, like creating APIs/interface data sources can 
implement to make use of a generalized query language.

And again, it's not that "Java" has these libraries...it's that just 
about anything you want is "out there" somewhere in the massive number 
of public/open/community projects. It may or may not be getting uptake 
because it may or may not be seen as generally useful enough for people 
to latch on.

- Charlie