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Java Annotated Monthly – December 2017
While usually the Java Annotated Monthly is brought to you by our colleague Trisha Gee, for the next few months, I’ll be your host, as Trisha is away on maternity leave. And from all of us here, congratulations to her and her family.
Due to multiple releases and important conferences, November is probably the hottest time of the year here at JetBrains. Finally, now when most of it is over, it’s time to compile the latest news into one piece.
Devoxx
Devoxx Belgium this year was as great as always. I’ll miss it, and I don’t solely mean the Belgian beer. If you didn’t make it there you missed some interesting talks, make sure to check out the session videos.
A shortlist of what I found interesting:
- Java Language Futures: All Aboard Project Amber by Brian Goetz
- Exploring Java 9: The Key Parts by Venkat Subramaniam
- Moving Java Forward Faster by Mark Reinhold & Brian Goetz
- Going Reactive with Spring 5 & Project Reactor by Mark Heckler, Josh Long
- Kotlin for Java Programmers by Venkat Subramaniam
KotlinConf
And of course a real highlight for us at JetBrains was KotlinConf in San Francisco, the first ever Kotlin conference and a large public event by JetBrains. As I heard from many people that were there, it was a lot of fun and brought together a lot of great people. If you’re curious as to what this was all about, spend a good hour and watch the opening keynote by Andrey Breslav. The videos from the other talks are also available, including the inspiring keynote on the second day by Erik Meijer.
My favorites:
- What’s New & Cool in Kotlin Tools by Dmitry Jemerov
- Kotlin for Data Science by Thomas Nield
- Deep Dive into Kotlin/Native by Andrey Breslav
- Deep Dives into Coroutines on JVM by Roman Elizarov
- Kotlin Static Analysis with Android Lint by Tor Norbye
QCon
QCon in San Francisco is another important event which some of our colleagues went to this time. We expect the organizers to start publishing the videos very soon. Meanwhile, you can read about the talk Roman Elizarov gave there on fresh async with Kotlin.
Finally, closing this season, the SpringOne Platform event is taking place right now in San Francisco. If you’re there and meet anyone from our team, say hi to them.
If you attend conferences, make sure you make the most out of them by reading a compilation of advice by Nicolas Fränkel.
Java 10 and beyond
The great and important news about Java is that the early access builds of Java 10 are now available for download. To better understand the schedule of the release and what’s making it in there, check out this page. If you’d like to learn more, you can also read this post. Some people have already given Java 10 a try and shared a glimpse into what the experience might be: check out Lukas Eder and Nicolai Parlog.
Java 9
For those of you not interested in that far into the future, you might find it useful to check out the Java 9 Module Cheat Sheet by RebelLabs.
If you’re concerned about how reflection works in Java 9, its limitations and the dirty hacks one can use to overcome them, read this post by Bartłomiej Mazur. Note, some of these hacks might not be recommended for use in production but rather to educate yourself on Java 9’s limitations.
Java EE
The Java EE and EE4J story keeps evolving. One of the notable JEPs announced recently is the removal of Java EE and CORBA from Java. It’s not scheduled yet for a particular release though. If you’re curious about the name, check out the 1st issue in their GitHub repo. The first phase of the brand name selection has finished, and the nominees are proposed.
Meanwhile, there are already nine new projects proposed at EE4J. More are on the way.
In other news:
- Oracle published their NovDec issue entirely focused on Java EE 8.
- IBM released an early implementation of Java EE 8 with their WebSphere Liberty.
Spring
Since the Spring project is so fast and diverse, there’ve been tons of new Spring releases. You can read about all of them on their blog.
The major news includes:
- Spring Tools 4 Beta is out. It includes Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Atom IDE
- End of first-class JDK 6 support
- Regular updates: Spring Boot 2.0.0 M7, Spring for Apache Kafka 2.1.0, Spring Session 2.0.0 RC2, Spring Batch 4.0.0, Spring Integration for AWS 1.1, Spring Security 5.0.0, Spring Integration 5.0
Android
Here’s a brief list of what’s going on within the Android community:
- Final preview of Android 8.1
- TensorFlow Lite – a lite version of TensorFlow for mobile and embedded devices available with Android 8.1
- Advanced Android Development – an instructor-led course similar to Android Developer Fundamentals and offered to undergraduate students of selected universities and colleges in India. If you’d like to offer Advanced Android Development at your university or college, contact Google
Kotlin
The most important news around Kotlin is, of course, Kotlin 1.2, featuring multi-platform projects. By introducing “common” and “platform-specific” modules, the update lets developers share and reuse their code across many platforms such as JVM and JavaScript.
Also, on Reddit, yesterday there was an AMA session (Ask Me Anything) on Kotlin. You can find there lots of interesting questions with answers right from the Kotlin team.
And Finally
IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 is out (as well as the other IntelliJ-based IDEs). The update brings tons of improvements, including Kotlin 1.2, Spring Boot, Java EE 8, JUnit, Scala, initial support for Java 10, and many more.
Ubuntu users may be glad to know that IntelliJ IDEA is now available with snaps.
On the disturbing side of news, Rogue Wave acquires ZeroTurnaround. Hope this won’t affect much JRebel and XRebel.
Last but not least, Vlad Mihalcea shared his “guide” on what it takes and how to become a Java Champion.
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