News

Java Annotated Monthly – May 2014

Here’s a few stories we’ve been reading on the Java beat this month, straight from the source. If you have any news or articles you would like to see here on the Java Annotated Monthly, you can reach me, Breandan dot Considine at JetBrains or @breandan.

Java

Java EE 8 Update – With the announcement of the Standard and Micro editions earlier this year, the final piece of the Java 8 puzzle has been announced, slated for release in Q3 2016. Read the draft proposal and add your feedback to JSR-342 by joining the conversation today.

Java Tools and Technologies Landscape for 2014 – RebelLabs’ annual technology survey. Compare it with last year’s edition, and check out Plumbr’s log level statistics on Java environments and application servers for corroborating results.

Java 9 development is now in motion, with a number of early access builds and a lively changelog each week. You can learn more about the direction of Java 9 from Mark Reinhold, and download a snapshot from Java.net to try it out today!

JVM

Groovy 2.3 Released – Introduces support for JDK 8, traits, tail recursion, closure parameter type inference, and a new markup engine among several smaller improvements.

Scala 2.11 Now Available – Scala 2.11 includes better modularization, faster reflection and stronger types. Check out the full changelog and download a copy of Scala 2.11 today.

Frameworks

What’s new in Play 2.3 – Introducing sbt-web, an asset pipeline for managing web assets with the Scala Build Tool. Play now bundles the Typesafe Activator, featuring browser-based code editing and elementary debugging for reactive applications. In addition to several performance enhancements and increased modularity, Play is also certified to work with Java 8. Read about platform direction and design rationale from James Roper, lead developer of Play Framework.

Apache Spark Release 1.0.0 – Spark is a fault tolerant cluster computing engine for machine learning and graph processing applications built on Hadoop. Learn more about resource management and YARN support on Spark from Sandy Ryza at Cloudera.

Neo4j 2.1 Released – Introduces .csv file importing, an experimental query planner and support for OpenJDK 7.

WildFly 8.1.0 Release Notes – The latest release of WildFly a.k.a. JBoss AS, picks up support for JSP on JDK 8, smarter thread pooling and in-place updates making setup quick and easy.

PrimeFaces 5 Released – There is more than meets the eye to PrimeFaces, including a new charts and graphs API, Push improvements, and internal remodeling for optimal accessibility.

Spring Batch 3.0.0 is now GA – Batch 3.0 turns a new page for Spring developers with revamped dependencies, Gradle support, standardized batch processing and SQLite integration.

Grails 2.4 Released – Much like Rails and Play, Grails now offers dedicated asset pipelining, and increased modularity as they move towards a Spring Boot foundation in 3.0.

Neo4j + Spring Data – a natural fit for my data – Exploit the flexibility of graph databases with Neo4j and Spring data to serve your business analytics on Vaadin.

Mobile

libGDX 1.1.0 released – Close on the heels of 1.0, Badlogic Games ships another stable update to their widely hailed cross-platform game development framework, you can learn all about libGDX and how to get started from their lead developer, Mario Zechner. The latest version picks up support for i18n and the newly released…

RoboVM 0.0.13 – Making steady progress on the mobile unification front, RoboVM is allowing Android developers to write native iOS apps in Java, and with limited success, in Kotlin. Learn more about using RoboVM from Niklas Therning’s tech talk at ITT.

Community

An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development – Planning on a long flight? You’ll need a few hours to appreciate this tremendous review of modern Java development, on everything from lambdas to logging frameworks. Follow the links for extra credit.

Introduction to JMH – Mikhail Vorontsov introduces us to the Java Microbenchmarking Harness and JMH Profilers.

Language Design Is Subtle – Lukas Eder delves into the finer points of language design with Java Language Architect, Brian Goetz.

vJUG, The world’s first online Java User Group is now in session! Join Simon Maple, Oliver White and thousands of others on Meetup, then check out past sessions on their homepage.

8 Great Java 8 Features No One’s Talking about

The effects of programming with Java 8 Streams on algorithm performance

Introducing Reactive Streams – A new streams library for reducing data flow congestion.

An Interview with Aleksey Shipilёv – Aleksey Shipilёv, Java Performance Engineer at Oracle, shares with us some thoughts on using and abusing JMH, JCStress and JOL.

What influences method call performance in Java?

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