Happy New Year everyone! For the last two years, I’ve started with a blog post (2017 link, 2018 link) giving my predictions for what will happen in the world of Java in the next twelve months. I saw no reason not to start this year in the same way. Overall, from a technical perspective, I
I’ve been in the IT industry for quite along time now. In fact, if you count from when I first started working as a programmer during my degree, it’s a little over 34 years. During that time I’ve seen quite a few changes, one of which is how much space it takes to install an
When Java was first launched, in 1995, the thing that made it really stand out was its ability to add an animation to a web page (good old tumbling Duke). Thinking about how we interact with devices today makes that sound ridiculous but, for those of us old enough to remember this, it was something
Earlier this year, Oracle announced that it was “enhancing” the traditional JavaOne conference. Personally, I found this a rather odd way of describing the changes that they had planned. Essentially, Oracle had decided to abandon the Java-only aspect of the conference and add content on several other languages (like Python and Javascript) as well as
Today saw the publication of “the largest survey ever of Java developers”, run by Simon Maple of Snyk and Andrew Binstock, Editor of the Java Magazine. As the first of a four-part series this set of results covers which JDK the 10,200 respondents make use of for their main projects. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority are
The world of Java is going through something of a change at the moment; specifically in the area of how people get updates to the Java Development Kit (JDK) to provide stability (bug fixes) and security (patches). Last week we had the release of JDK 11 including, by my count, some 90 new features and
The new six-month release cadence of the JDK means before we’ve even really figured out what the new features are in JDK 10, along comes JDK 11. I posted an earlier blog where I listed all 109 new features and APIs I could find in JDK 10, so it seemed obvious to do the same
This week was the JavaZone conference in Oslo, which I was fortunate to attend again. Looking back, this is the seventh time I’ve presented at this conference. As with other Java conferences that have been running for many years, the organisation has become flawless. That said, I know the organisers put in an incredible amount
In an earlier blog, I wrote about what comes after JDK 8. This examined what factors might affect people’s decisions about which version of the JDK to move to after JDK 8. What’s becoming increasingly clear is that there is still considerable confusion about how having a new JDK release every six months will impact
As the Azul alternate representative on the JCP Executive Committee (EC), I get to attend all the EC meetings and take part in the various discussions. One topic that the EC has been devoting a lot of energy to recently is the adoption of the Java platform, post-JDK 8. Ordinarily, this would be a discussion
It has become clear to me, having spoken to many developers at many different events and seen recent postings on sites like Reddit, that there is still a lot of confusion about how the JDK will be delivered and updated in the future. In this post, I’ll clarify, as concisely as possible, with references to
Or should I say, Java’s Magic Source? If we go all the way back to JDK 1.0, there were 211 classes in the public API. Out of interest, I created a graph showing the growth in public classes over time. To extract my data I used the API documentation and copied the list of all
