Developer Week in Review: Oracle's big bet fails to pay off

Google dodges a bullet, a new Perl in town, and GCC loses an OS.

I’ve been taking the opportunity this week to do some spring office cleaning. Unfortunately, I clean my home office infrequently enough that at a certain point, cleaning it becomes more an exercise in archeology than organization. There’s nothing like finding a six-month-old check you never deposited to encourage more frequent cleaning.

The same can be said for code, of course. It’s far too easy to let crufty code build up in an application, and then be faced with the mother of all refactoring efforts six months down the road, when your code finally reaches a critical mass of flaky behavior. It’s worth the effort to continually refactor and improve your code, assuming you can convince your product management that quality is as important as new features.

Android is almost out of the woods

It wouldn’t be a Week in Review without the latest in Godzilla vs. Gamera Oracle vs. Google. Things aren’t looking all too sunny for Oracle at the moment, as the jury in the case just threw out all the patent-related claims in the lawsuit. This doesn’t leave Oracle with much left on the plate, as the case now boils down to the question of whether the Java APIs are copyrightable. That’s a matter the jury is deadlocked on.

Like all things legal, this is going to drag on for years as there are appeals and retrials and the like. But for the moment, it appears that Android is out of the woods, at least as far as the use of Java is concerned. Of course, there’s still all those pesky International Trade Commission issues keeping many Android handsets waiting at the border, but that’s a battle for another day …

Scripters of the world, rejoice!

For Perl developers, a point release of the language is a major event, as it only occurs roughly once a year. This year’s edition has just been released, and Perl 5.16 packs a ton of improvements (nearly 600,000 lines’ worth!).

Since Perl is such a mature language, most of the changes are incremental. Probably the most significant is further enhancements in Unicode support. Nonetheless, there should be something useful for the serious Perl developer.

FreeBSD bids GCC farewell

As the licensing on the GCC compiler has become increasingly restrictive, some of us have been wondering when the fallout would start. Wait no longer: The FreeBSD team has ditched GCC for the more BSD-friendly licensing of Clang.

GCC has spent decades as the compiler of choice for just about everything, but recent changes in the GPL have made it less attractive to use, especially in commercial development. With the Apple-sponsored Clang compiler now seen as a viable (and perhaps even superior) alternative, with a much less restrictive license, the Free Software Foundation may need to decide if it would rather stand on principle, or avoid becoming marginalized.

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