In his keynote at the JavaOne Conference, James Governor said, “Things have changed in the Java ecosystem, probably more in the past three weeks, than they have in the previous thirteen years.” Now JavaOne has only just ended, and we’re still trying to sift through the vast volumes of information pouring out from this conference, but with the recent releases of Java 9 and Java EE 8, new Java projects announced at JavaOne, and the general move of most things Java to open source, we tend to agree.
A few new projects were announced at this conference, but the big ones were clearly the Wercker and Fn projects. Wercker is centered around microservices development for Java developers on top of Kubernetes, and Fn is a container native serverless platform that you can run anywhere. Fn packages your functions as containers and runs on any platform supporting Docker. It was interesting to watch the Fn project being open sourced as part of the keynote, live!
For more on micro-profiles/services, check out Jump-start Your Microservices Development with Java EE, Baking a Java EE 8 Micro Pi, and Three Microservice Patterns to Tear Down Your Monoliths.
Major releases of Java are now planned every six months, and the next version of Java will not be 10, but 18, to be released in March 2018. Of course, there’s a lot of ‘awesome’ in Java 9 already, as thoroughly covered in a plethora of sessions. An interesting way to learn about some new APIs in Java 9, is to explore them with JShell, and here’s a session on the now default G1 GC in JDK 9. Learn about JUnit 5, the first JUnit release in a decade, and finally – here are sessions on “Hidden Gems” in JDK 9, as well as the some module fundamentals.
On the Java EE (or should we say EE4J?) front, there were a number of sessions on Java EE 8, which has quite a few cool new/updated JSRs to offer. Some interesting sessions included Taking Java EE to the Clouds, and What’s new in the Java EE 8 Release. Looking for something a bit more detailed? Then try Discover CDI 2 0 in Live Coding, JAX RS and CDI Bike the Reactive Bridge, or Adam Bien’s Java EE: Heavyweight or Lightweight—Mythbusters.
“EE4J is EE for the next generation,” said David Blevins.
Understandably, the recent move of Java EE to the Eclipse foundation, elicited quite a bit of interest. There were a couple of panel discussions on Eclipse Enterprise for Java, and Accelerating the Adoption of Java EE 8 with Eclipse MicroProfile. A detailed analysis on this recent move, associated community concerns, and decisions, can be found in this article by David Heffelfinger.
Check out the JavaOne Keynote and the JavaOne Intel Keynote for an overall perspective on where Java is heading. James’ post JavaOne article on the Java Ecosystem, makes for an interesting concluding read, and can be found here.
