Java Annotated Monthly – February 2018

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Since Trisha, your regular host, is still away, I’m in charge of updating you on what noteworthy things are going on in the community. My apologies upfront that this time it took a bit longer to compile everything together. Still, I hope you find most of the news and articles fresh and relevant.

Events

In last month on my radar, there was only one event that captured my interest – FOSDEM that took place in Brussels. In case you don’t follow it, FOSDEM is one of the most important events around open source. Since Java is a great part of it, FOSDEM dedicates an entire track to it. Don’t worry if you missed the event. The videos and slides from most of the talks are already available. In case you have time for just one video, my recommendation would be State of OpenJDK by Mark Reinhold.

Also, I should mention here the news that Kotlin Conf 2018 has been announced and will take place on the 3rd-5th of October in Amsterdam. If you use Kotlin or plan to do so, make sure to mark this date in your calendar. In case you’d like to give a talk there, hurry and submit it now.

Java

Oracle published a fresh issue of Java Magazine. The main topic of the issue is reactive programming. If you didn’t watch the topic until now, use this chance to read up on what the whole buzz is about by checking out this issue.

Also, Oracle have updated the Java SE support roadmap. The important news is that the availability of Java SE 8 updates has been extended to January 2019. For non-corporate use, the availability of the updates has been extended to the end of 2020.

Speaking of the Java release cycle, Stephen Colebourne wrote an interesting post on it in regard to Java 9.

Mark Reinhold announced entering the release candidate phase for Java 10. The first release candidate is already out.

If you’d like to refresh your knowledge on what features Java 10 brings with it (beyond the local variable type inference), you may want to read a nice summary about it written by Artem Smotrakov.

In case Java 10 is not cutting-edge enough for you anymore, and you’d like to know what’s coming next, check out the page with the JEPs that target Java 11.

Also, there are a few noteworthy JEP drafts tossed recently: launching single-file source programs (java HelloWorld.java), raw string literals (containing no escaping, supporting newlines), incubating language and VM features (experimental features, see also incubator modules).

Yolande Poirier announced the availability of the new experimental asynchronous API for JDBC as part of OpenJDK 10. You can download the new API and try it out. Your feedback is welcome on the jdbc-spec-discuss@openjdk.java.net mailing list.

If you’d like to learn more about the new HTTP Client API (added with Java 9), there’s a nice official intro with lots of details (including the update on its current status and future).

Meanwhile, Mike Milinkovich shares an update on what’s up with EE4J. Long story short: the code is moving to GitHub; the short-term objective is to ship a Java EE 8-compliant release as quickly as possible. Also, Mike announced that a draft of the EE.next Working Group charter was posted for community review. Comments and feedback are welcomed on the ee4j-community@eclipse.org mail list.

Ivar Grimstad spoke to InfoQ and commented on the status of MVC 1.0 which is going to be integrated into EE4J.

That’s probably all I have got in regards to news and rumors.

Releases

There are at least two notable RCs announced recently: Spring Boot 2.0 and JUnit 5.1. If you’re migrating to JUnit 5 or plan to do so, make sure to read a nice summary of JUnit 5 best practices by Billy Korando.

Android Studio Beta 2 is out and available in the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels. If you are interested, you can learn what’s new in Android Studio 3.1 by checking out this page.

Concerning Android, Kotlin is still taking over conversations in the community. Google announced Kotlin KTX – “a set of extensions designed to make writing Kotlin code for Android more concise, idiomatic, and pleasant”.

Kotlin in turn recently announced the v1.2.20 update. The key highlights are support for Gradle build cache, faster incremental compilation for Android and mixed Java/Kotlin projects, and inlay hints in the IDE.

Articles and videos

Here’s a list of some of the things I came across and found interesting:

Books

In the previous issue, we mentioned the release of the 3rd edition of Effective Java addressing the changes in Java 7, Java 8, and Java 9. If you haven’t read it yet but are curious about what the additions are, read the blog post by Dustin Marx summing them all up.

Tooling

And finally, IntelliJ IDEA 2018.1 EAP is out with tons of improvements and new features.

That’s it for this time. I hope you’ve enjoyed the issue and found at least one or two bits of the news or articles interesting or helpful.

Happy developing!

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