Featured White Papers

• Measuring Risk to Improve Java Software Quality
• Do You Really Get Classloaders?
• Pragmatic Continuous Delivery with Jenkins, Nexus, and LiveRebel
• Your Next Java Web App: Less XML, No Long Restarts, Fewer Hassles
• Coding with JRebel, Java Forever Changed
• 2012 Developer Productivity Report: Java Tools, Tech, Devs, and Data

Sponsored Links

• Graph databases are 1000x faster than relational.

  Learn More!

• Career opportunities at Harman- Careers That'll Rock Your Socks Off.

  Learn More!

• Developer-friendly Java PDF libraries by Qoppa Software

  Live Demos

• Stop blaming your app! Diagnose Java performance issues.

  Free tool >

• UrbanCode: Go From Continuous Integration to
  Continuous Delivery

  Learn More!

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

A first look at Gavin King's Ceylon

Ceylon's Milestone 5 release showcases a promising but still young language

By Andrew C. Oliver, InfoWorld, 04/25/13

Page 3 of 3

What you see is the kind of minor API design that will happen with a few people using it. This will most certainly happen as Ceylon matures.

Features
Ceylon has a lot of nice features, from higher-order functions to function references. It has solid typing stuff like unions and intersections. I started to implement some of these into Granny, but thought better of it. My longest while statement comprises one line. I could have made a higher-order function, but would it be more intuitive or clearer? If I was doing something more than creating an object from a result set, maybe. In this case, no.

Conclusion
Personally, I categorize languages based on where you pay the pain. In JavaScript, for instance, I have a very short learning curve and rapid development. On a large JavaScript project, I start paying the pain at the end of the project while debugging.

For the uninitiated, Ceylon makes you take the pain up front, especially in getting used to its type system and the items it eliminates. However, I can already see it would probably pay it forward on my first debugging session with a larger project.

Moreover, if you've ever wanted to get involved in open source, these folks are some of the more helpful and motivated I've encountered. Many developers try their hand at mature projects and find there is no low-hanging fruit. This is your chance to work on something where people are motivated and helpful, and there's enough to be done that a new recruit can get involved easily.

Ceylon isn't ready for prime time yet, but it's very promising. Granny's Addressbook works in Ceylon (with a few caveats). Ceylon has a lot of great features, but many of them aren't needed for such a simple application. Still, use of Ceylon's more involved features made my code shorter, more concise, and easier to read. I look forward to seeing Ceylon develop.

This article, "A first look at Gavin King's Ceylon," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Keep up on the latest developments in application development and read more of Andrew Oliver's Strategic Developer blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.