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The Java Specialists' Newsletter
Issue 0772003-09-02
Category:
Software Engineering
Java version: "Wonderfully disgusting hack"by Dr. Heinz M. Kabutz
Welcome to the 77th edition of The Java(tm) Specialists' Newsletter. I sent out a newsletter last week to
see who preferred text over HTML, especially regarding SPAM filters. Due to
the public outcry at the suggestion of moving away from HTML, I will in future
send all newsletters as HTML. Please change your SPAM filters to receive emails
from my email addresses.
I am sitting in a hotel room in a stunning little town in Switzerland
called Zug whilst my daughter is celebrating her second birthday today.
My voyage began on Saturday afternoon from Cape Town to
Johannesburg, and on towards Zurich. My suitcase had other ideas.
He liked Johannesburg quite a lot, and together with the other suitcases
from the flight, decided to stay overnight and then instead travel to
Paris, go on a tour of the Eiffel tower, meet some pretty lady suitcases,
etc. He arrived last evening at my hotel door, looking rather bedraggled,
with an accusing look on his face: "Why didn't you call?" he told me as
he walked through the door. He amused himself by the look of his owner
squashed into a one-size-too-small shirt that belonged to our Swiss
customer. "What's with the shirt?!" he had the audacity to exclaim.
If he thinks he is coming with to China, he has another thing coming!
"Wonderfully disgusting hack"
People sometimes ask me how I find out the things that I write about
in my newsletter. The answer is that I don't know how. It is pretty
much a random walk through the JDK source code that gets me the best
results.
Last night, whilst my suitcase was screaming through the air at 30'000
feet, I spent some time reading through a new release of the J2EE
Core Patterns book. Whilst I was reading it, I was getting more and
more agitated with the way that exceptions were being handled. You
know I am not a fan of checked exceptions, and in a future newsletter
will expound on this. I got sidetracked from reading the book, and
ended up reading up on how java.awt handles exceptions. During these
explorations, I stumbled across a comment in the java.awt.Toolkit class
in JDK 1.4.2 that is simply priceless. It goes like so:
static boolean enabledOnToolkit(long eventMask) {
// Wonderfully disgusting hack for Solaris 9
Is that not cute? To write that in code that you know could
possibly be read by 3'000'000 Java developers around the globe takes
a lot of chutzpah.
I did a search on the classes in the JDK 1.4.2 and found
45 classes that contained the word "hack". A great portion of these
are from org.apache.* packages, but the majority is from code
by Sun Microsystems.
Now the magic question: Am I worried? I am trying to build software
for major industry players on top of a basic platform that contains
45 classes with documented hacks! Perhaps I should be worried -
but I am not. What is worse than knowing you are an idiot? Worse is
thinking you are not a dolt, but actually, being one.
Therefore, here are some reasons why I feel more comfortable than ever to
write industry-strength code on top of Sun's JDK:
- All software contains hacks.
- I would prefer to know about them.
- Only a real developer would write "hack" into his comments.
- I am therefore more comfortable using Sun's JDK than some black-box
proprietary solution with hundreds of undocumented hacks.
This is a really short newsletter, just to get this topic off my chest.
Do yourself a favour and look at the source code of java.awt.Toolkit
in JDK 1.4.2. I think you will enjoy it :-)
Warm regards from Switzerland, and my suitcase also says "hi".
Heinz
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