Java Annotated Monthly – November 2018

Trisha Gee

In which we cover: IBM buying Red Hat; why AdoptOpenJDK is the best place to get your JDK from; a whole bunch of Kotlin articles and tutorials; and a mix of culture and community news and articles that seem relevant to developers.

Java News

The big news this month was IBM acquiring Red Hat. This section includes some coverage of this news, along with other notable events from this last month.

• IBM to Acquire Red Hat: A Java-Oriented First Look
• “IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat is a signal that we are entering the next phase of the cloud battle”
• IBM’s Red Hat Buy Aims to Bring the ‘Hybrid Cloud’ to the Enterprise
• The Future of Java is Today: CodeOne (née JavaOne) Keynote Highlights
• Snyk JVM Survey Report – the results of the latest survey of the JVM Ecosystem.
  • Measuring Up Java Usage – Azul’s summary of the results.
  • IntelliJ IDEA and Kotlin top choices for JVM developers – from the IntelliJ IDEA blog.
• Should you adopt Java 12 or stick on Java 11? – let me guess: it depends?
• AdoptOpenJDK – this is the best place to get a free-to-use JDK for a range of versions and platforms.
  • Now with JDK 11
  • Support provided for LTS releases for at least four years
  • AdoptOpenJDK Open for Business – Windows and Mac Installation Instructions.
  • IBM Supporting the Java Community – “IBM will partner with other members of the OpenJDK community to continue to update an OpenJDK Java 8 stream with security patches and critical bug fixes.”

Really nice push for the @adoptopenjdk in the Keynote of the Groundbrakers in the @OracleCodeOne by great people like @trisha_gee@sjmaple @danielbryantuk #CodeOne pic.twitter.com/ez9aVkNIAb

— Nacho Cougil (@icougil) October 25, 2018

Java Tutorials & Tips

The usual mixed bag of helpful tips and step-by-step tutorials.

• Using jlink to Build Java Runtimes for non-Modular Applications – jlink is a really useful tool that lets you bundle the bits of the JDK that you need for your application; look at using this instead of a JRE (which is no longer available since 11).
• Java Local Variable Type Inference: Frequently Asked Questions – this has been updated; well worth reading if you’re using Java 10 or above.
• Fighting Java Memory Leak in Production Systems
• Specification Pattern in Java – this pattern can be especially helpful in automated tests.
• Micronaut with Kotlin and Java with Groovy tests – because one JVM language is never enough.
• Top 20 Core Java Interview Questions and Answers from Investment Banks – part of me thinks it’s sad that these haven’t changed much since I was last interviewing for the London banks ten years ago. But on the other hand, hey, if you learn this stuff for interview, it apparently never goes out of fashion.

Languages, Frameworks and Libraries

Accidentally contains a whole bunch of Kotlin stuff, since this seems to have been a popular topic in October. Also, Microservices and Reactive, because they’re Not Dead Yet.

• An Introduction to Kotlin for Serverside Java Developers – in case you don’t already know what Kotlin is.
• Getting Started With Kotlin (and Maven) (video)
• Learning Kotlin Language Features By Practice – Part 1 (video)
• Spotlight on libraries: Top 5 open source libraries for Kotlin – it’s not just about the language, but what you can use it with.
• Why Bother with Kotlin – Not Just Another Language Tour (video)
• Oracle Introduces Helidon – A Lightweight Java Microservices Framework – because we don’t have enough microservices frameworks yet.
• Decoupling in Cloud Era: Building Cloud Native Microservices with Spring Cloud Azure – see?
• Modeling Uncertainty with Reactive DDD – Domain Driven Design is still one of my favorite tools for figuring out what to code, and it applies nicely to distributed systems too.
• Multi-service Reactive Streams Using Spring, Reactor, and RSocket (video) – Buzzword Bingo Winner: microservices and reactive.
• Give REST a Rest with RSocket – I found RSocket hard to use as the documentation isn’t very mature, but Josh Long and I used it in our Oracle Code One demo and it’s got a lot of potential.

Going full #reactive with @trisha_gee and @starbuxman@springframework @ProjectReactor @kotlin @MongoDB #JavaFX@OracleCodeOne #CodeOne #OOW2018 pic.twitter.com/9yquI7Ubq8

— Sebastien Pelletier (@sebastien_pel) October 24, 2018

Culture & Community

As usual, other interesting pieces that are less code-specific and more about our industry, our productivity, and stuff that caught my eye.

• Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women – because machine learning learns from us and our society.
• Who Should Pay for Upskilling Software Developers? Individuals or Employers? – there’s no doubt that if you invest your own time it improves your career, but should it all be down to you?
• Why You Need To Say ‘No’ At Work (Hint: Your Work Will Get Better) – still working on it…
• That Stress You Feel? It’s A ‘Mental Load’ Of Invisible Work That Needs Talking About
• Why We Always Switch Productivity Methods Before They Stick, According To Science
• How do you prioritize testing in your CI pipeline? – a questionnaire, if you feel like helping out with your own experiences.
• [FOSDEM] FOSDEM 2019 – Free Java Tools and Editors DevRoom CfP – we’re on the committee for a new Free Tools and Editors DevRoom at FOSDEM, and we’d love you to submit talks.
• Martin Fowler Discusses New Edition of Refactoring, along with Thoughts on Evolutionary Architecture – …and answers the question “why did you choose JavaScript?”
• Rewire your brain to beat procrastination – yeah, I’ll read this later…
• Workflows for the New Developer Experience – how do developers really work, and how can we improve things?
• How writing tests can make you a faster and more productive developer – tests are good, mmmkay?
• Last month I gave a talk about Code Review Best Practices, and it hardly mentions Upsource at all. Two versions are available, depending upon which suits you: a traditional presentation video, where you can see me and the slides, and a webinar recording which is just the slides. Read the blog post for more context.
• I also gave a short keynote on Career Advice for Architects. There’s a short snippet here and you can watch the full thing if you have a Safari Books Online account.

Events

Looking at events for the rest of the year:

• 12–16 Nov: Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp – Valerie Andrianova, Trisha Gee, and Eugene Petrenko are all presenting, and JetBrains has a booth.
• 23–34 Nov: Devoxx Ukraine – Valerie Andrianova and Anton Arhipov are presenting, and we have a booth.
• 26–30 Nov: AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas
• 30 Nov–1 Dec: DevTernity
• 3–5 Dec: DockerCon Europe

And Finally

Here’s a chance to catch up on the IntelliJ IDEA and other JetBrains news that you might have missed:

• What’s new for Spring Boot in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3
• IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 Release Candidate is here!
• AWS, Serverless, Developer Experience, and More (webinar recording)
• Preview Raw String Literals in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 – raw String literals are a really nice feature that is worth being aware of even if you’re not planning to use Java 12 yet.
• Don’t forget our blog series on Spring Boot and Kotlin support in IntelliJ IDEA.

If you have any interesting or useful Java / JVM news to share via Java Annotated Monthly, leave a comment or drop me a message via Twitter.

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