Saturday, January 03, 2009

Incompatible changes ...

One of the few processes in Sun I used to feel good about was the stress on backward compatibility - and sanctity of exposed interfaces.
But of late, particularly with xml on java - looks like incompatibilities are creeping in quite a bit. I do understand the complexities of writing robust, performent and secure xml parsing libraries ... and the pitfalls which exists there : but breaking basic interfaces ?

As an example (which I hit in last couple of days), consider EntityResolver2.getExternalSubset ... one of the two methods on that interface - and broken now !
This used to work in jdk5 and does not do so in jdk6 ...

The bug which was raised by someone in July last year is still uncommented upon by Sun !!

To say I am slightly frustrated would be putting it mildly. Sad, sad indeed ... and worse, I cant seem to find any workarounds :-(

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi,

I came to know that you are the author of the chess engine - http://www.geocities.com/mridulm80/messchess.htm

I would like to download a copy of it and play with it a bit.

Would it possible to do this?

Regards
Daniel Shroff

2/12/2009 01:11:00 AM  
Blogger Mridul said...

It is not available for download and remains private. I dont work on it actively, just off and on - but dont want to distribute it.

- Mridul

2/12/2009 05:46:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi,

Any plan to change your decision? I am ready to offer a top dollar for it.

Cheers,
Daniel Shroff

2/25/2009 09:11:00 PM  

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