Bill Roper's Journal

I am gradually figuring out more and more about how to work with Java types, enums, autoboxing, and generics, which is important when you're doing inbound XML serialization, as you end up needing to create a lot of objects. I've written a bunch of little utility routines that keep my XML consistent and the resulting XML document is making successful round trips, which I find very encouraging.

Eventually, I will have written enough utilities to cover all of my current cases. Right now, I'm still at the stage where I go to serialize another class and go, "Whoops! Time to write some more serialization code..."

Today was spent working through the Cloneable interface and creating copy constructors for the various classes I've been working on. Despite various dire warnings that I found via Google about the problems with the Cloneable interface, it appears to be one that we're using around here, so I will just have to use it carefully. :)

In other news, I sent off an e-mail that may result in stress reduction. We'll see how that goes...

I spent today immersed in Java generics, trying to figure out how to write an abstract base class using generics that would do everything that I wanted it to do. I've coded something up and sent it to one of the fellows in the shop who is a good bit further along with Java coding than I am (since I am at less than a week, that wouldn't be saying a lot, but apparently he's quite good) and we'll see what he has to say about my questions on the subject.

The thing that's causing me the problem is that I'm building a tree of items (in arbitrary order, so it doesn't look like there's anything in the Collection classes that quite does what I need) where each node in the tree has a unique key. Normally, that key is a String and needs to be searched for in a case-insensitive fashion. But in one of the cases where I want to use this generic tree class, the key is going to be a complex object, because when I'm storing time periods, you can't really compare any sort of reasonable human-readable String using a normal String comparison and get the right answer.

I'm trying to code a Find function and pass it my arbitrary generic Key and I'm having a real problem getting it to work. Maybe what I should be doing is actually storing the TreeItems in a Tree and putting a HashMap into the Tree to solve the Find problem. Except right now, I'm storing just one reference to the HashMap in the root object for the Tree.

Of course, if the generic Tree class extends the generic TreeItem class, I could probably get that trick to work... :)