0 comments
Java 
It’s busy again in San Francisco: with Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne together it seems like everyone wears a conference badge. JavaOne is organized a bit different over last year, it now has more focus on Java.Lots of different partners and vendors have showed up to present sessions, organize events and show off at the pavilion. The first day is not without hickups: small print on slides, sound issues, even some burning smells of short circuited equipment, and a spotty wifi. But the content is certainly worth it.
Java is moving forward again, with Java 7 out, people already talk about it like the “old” release, and how Java 8 and 9 will improve on it. For Java 8, lambda expressions and modularity are still in scope and the discussions are in a final stage. Also, participation in OpenJDK is booming. After IBM and Apple, now SAP and Azul also participate in developing the JDK. Today, IBM announced its Java 7 JDK as well, great timing!
Throughout the conference, there is a lot of emphasis on performance. Larry Ellison showed that he really knows his math, as everything was 10x faster, and 100x cheaper, according to some crazy calculations. Intel and Hotspot/Weblogic also showed some impressive improvements. Performance still matters for Java vendors, and that’s a good thing: faster is always better for users and developers as well.
The JRockit and Hotspot merge means that a lot of the JRockit diagnostics tooling will be available in the “default” JVM soon. Very useful tools like the flight recorder will be available in JDK 8. The merge also means the death of the dreaded PermGen in Hotspot, as the auto-management behavior of JRockit will become the default. In the end, the one remaining “default” Hotspot VM will be much easier to use in really demanding production environments.
Java EE 7 is very much focused on the cloud. Until now, the Java cloud story is fragmented and driven independently by various companies. Java EE 7 should provide basic platform as a service capabilities. This allows appservers to be better engineered for the cloud, and developers and administrators to take advantage of a much easier deployment story. Glassfish 4 will be the first appserver to support this, and a basic cloud story was already demod in the keynote this morning. Even if you are not looking for cloud because of flexible hardware, it definately helps deployment a lot. These new features are very interesting for everyone who is using Java EE right now, not just cloudheads.
With all these new versions, when will able to use them? Well, Oracle Weblogic 10.3.6 and 12.1.1 is announced for a release this year. 10.3.6 will bring JDK 7 support, and 12.1.1 Java EE 6! With Apache, JBoss and IBM rallying as well this means both Java 7 and EE 6 will be mainstream choices for everyone soon.
There is tons of new stuff not yet mentioned here. JavaFX 2.0 for instance, the big reboot for Java desktop development technology. Or the various embedded, mobile, and scripting innovations. I might comment on those some more on my next post. Now, it’s time to get some sleep, another long day tomorrow!