Chris Adamson has posted what he admits is a "highly opinionated" tour of the top ten requests for enhancement (RFE's) on Sun's Java Bug Parade. For each, he summarizes the issues, and assesses whether the RFE is a good idea and if he thinks it's likely to get done in Dolphin. The ten requests are pulled from the list of the Top 25 RFE's as voted for by registered SDN members.

Bug ID 4820062 - Provide "struct" syntax in the Java language Bug quality: High Odds for Dolphin: Medium Not quite C structs, but the idea is that given some arrangement of primitive members, you know the size of the arrangement (or struct) and could operate over them in memory in a fast, efficient way. The proposal comes from the needs of game programmers to load in OpenGL vertexes, textures, etc., in a highly-efficient way. This isn’t as icky-C as it might first seem, but then again, one of the knocks against Java from the scripting crowd is that the primitives were a premature optimization — Sun’s evaluation suggests that similar functionality could be achieved with annotations and a library to process them. This is an interesting problem and proposal either way.

For the rest of the list, visit http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/07/touring_the_top_10_rfes.html. Are there any you'd like to see taken off, or added?

This kind of feature will definitely help decrease the development time of Java based games and animation. In addition, it will help organize and write complex animation. "structs" are quite handy in OpenGL and I have personally missed this kind of feature when working (in my free time) in JOGL (Java version of OpenGL). -GT http://gautam_tandon.home.comcast.net

Bug ID 4910812 - Enhance Hot Code Replacement From http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4910812 "As of JDK1.4.x it is possible to replace running "hot" code, as long as this does'nt affect the class' public signature in general. To really ease and speed development, this "hot code replacement" feature should be extended to include the possibility to alter class level and other "signature changing" operations (alter/add/remove methods and instance variables)." This is actually the biggest thing on my wishlist for future java versions because development would be much faster... Anyone on TSS thinking the same way ? Then please vote on http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4910812 for this RFE.

Bug ID 4910812 - Enhance Hot Code Replacement

From http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4910812

"As of JDK1.4.x it is possible to replace running "hot" code, as long as this does'nt affect the class' public signature in general.

To really ease and speed development, this "hot code replacement" feature should be extended to include the possibility to alter class level and other "signature changing" operations (alter/add/remove methods and instance variables)."

This is actually the biggest thing on my wishlist for future java versions because development would be much faster...

Anyone on TSS thinking the same way ? Then please vote on http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4910812 for this RFE.

yes this is also my top RFE. The feature is kind of planned for Dolphin. This was the last thing said about it by sun on http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=572396&start=30&tstart=120 : Good news! Extending RedefineClasses and RetransformClasses to allow the addition of methods and to allow some method attribute changes is currently planned for Dolphin. However, Dolphin feature work has not been finalized. Also, because of the complexity of this work, it may only be supported for use during development. As to where to look to sources: it is in the HotSpot sources. The place to start is src/share/vm/prims/jvmtiRedefineClasses.cpp -Robert I hope they really do it! Some dont like the idea but hey since it is only a development thing, what can be wrong about it?