Sun: proving their stupidity once again

Sun is just so out of touch with Java users. Geert’s recent question about annotation support in HotSwap is a perfect example.

Are annotations hot-swappable?:

I’ve been working on annotations support in RIFE for a few days, and now that I’m testing them in real projects I stumbled into what seems like a major downer.

(Via New RIFERS blogs entries from Geert Bevin.)

Users want to be able to make changes quickly. Sun can support it with HotSwap. In fact, Sun could, if they wanted, make HotSwap support complete for development work (it would be unsafe for production).

But instead, Sun pulls a bonehead move and takes a step backward. They introduce annotations, a perfect replacement for more verbose XML, but don’t permit them to be changed quickly at runtime. Now XML is still the best option for rapid development, purely because frameworks like WebWork can reload the XML when they see the file has changed.

Sun: get with the program!

What can you do? Vote for the bug that would resolve this, and also provide feedback on their forums begging for them to shape up.