Today was a kind of a milestone for a project I'm currently working on along with some of my co-workers. As part of our many-a-day trips to refill our coffee mugs, my boss and I were unofficially (in other words, just a conversation, not policy making) discussing how the project flow could have been improved..

There was the obvious..
Good lord people, haven't you ever heard of unit test files!

and the ever popular, yet often ignored..
Proper test data setup before you attempt to test code

What was more interesting is the discussion how improvements to Java would have made our lives easier.. mainly couple things..

1. (this one's mine) Templates.. not just interfaces (which Java has, duh) but templates ala C++.
2. Common error handling. What a drag it is to have to write try-catch blocks.. Certainly, you can combine and streamline much of that code, but cannot avoid those try-catches.

That's my Java wish list for the day.