The main news so far has been the release of Java 11. It's not a large release in terms of new developer functionality since Java 10, but it is the first Long Term Support Release since Java 8, so if you've been hanging around on Java 8, now's the time to look at all new things that made it into Java 9, 10, and 11. Java 11 also removes things. This, like, never happens in Java. Also noteworthy, Oracle changed its licensing and support model since Java 8. Read this month's Annotated Monthly to find out more. (more…)

If you stay up to date on news from the Java community, you may have heard that Oracle have changed their support model for Java.  Some news is even suggesting that we now have to pay to use Java - this is not true! (more…)

This week Java 11 was released! It feels like only yesterday that we was saying the same thing about Java 9. This new six monthly release cadence is a big change for the Java community, and a welcome one - Java developers are getting small drops of interesting new features regularly. (more…)

This month's annotated monthly has a nice wide selection of reading for you to take to the beach, including chunky sections on Community and Culture, since it's not always about lines of code.  Or, if you actually are going on vacation, you could just leave all this alone for a while and recharge your batteries. I suggest the latter, although that's a more difficult proposition if you have kids. You might already be looking forward to going back to work... (more…)

The next version of Java is due out in September, and IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 is ready for it.  The main code feature in Java 11 is Local-Variable Syntax for Lambda Parameters - Java 10 gave us the ability to use the var keyword for variables inside methods, now Java 11 lets us use this in lambda expressions: BiConsumer<Processor, String> consumer = (var x, var y) -> x.process(y); At first glance, although this removes the type information from: BiConsumer<Processor, String> consumer = (Processor x, String y) -> x.process(y); it's actually not very compelling when you consid