Java Tiger

Lately i have been toying with Tiger's new features. Autoboxing is cool for sure, and generics can be useful at times. For a developer never written in C++, i learnt to live without it.
Really using MVC, and interface based programming i am quiet happy. For me the major improvements are the Swing /performance improvements. Rich client space will be the next battlefield of .NET and Java. Armed with Longhorn buzz and enjoying Windows integration .NET is close to finish. However healthy competition in Java space could push up.
What is more, for me desktop is shifting towards cellphone monitors, J2ME is running well ahead there.
Anyway XML based GUI definitions are the way go. Then specific renderers can be written to output to html, swing or .NET who knows. Swings MVC paradigm fits into stateless HTML pages so well. Web applications tend to keep state information on server(sessions), Swing lets the same with model objects. At least the way it should be done is so. The only gap is event handling, and JSF nicely bridges there with its component oriented architecture.

Well here are my random thoughts at the end of a week.
This weekend i will be coding to integrate a web app with production line controller.
i hope to investigate JasperReports and WebWork 2.1.