There is a simple reality in computing, which is that accessing data from memory is significantly faster than from disk. It’s just physics. Hard disk drives spin and use a moving head to read and write data to the disk via changes in the magnetic field. Despite high spin speeds and small heads, there…
It’s now been a little over two years since Oracle announced it was making some significant changes to the way the Java platform is developed, distributed and updated. This was just before the release of JDK 9 and the fact that the current release is JDK 13 shows how quickly Java is now changing. The…
I recently noticed that Applets are now, to use a Monty Python analogy, the Norwegian Blue of client-side development. If you go all the way back to when Java was being developed, it was an Applet that caught everyone’s attention. In early 1995, John Gage, Director of Sun Microsystems’ Science Office was heading to Monterey…
We are now well into the new six-month release cadence of the JDK and, with the release of JDK 13, it is clearly working successfully. One thing that is obvious, is that, whilst the overall rate of change for the Java platform has increased, individual releases will have less new features. This is the case…
The Zing Virtual Machine (ZVM) has been developed to address the performance-related issues that result from a managed runtime environment that is provided by the JVM. These fall into two specific areas: Application response latency caused by the garbage collector (GC) pausing application threads to perform its work. Reduced initial throughput when an application is…
Keeping Java production systems secure and up-to-date can be an operational challenge. There’s always a balance between disrupting operations and reducing the risk of vulnerabilities. No time is that trade-off more apparent than the third Tuesday of January, April, July and October when the steward of Java releases new updates. Java has been updated on…
For those of you old enough to remember the film, Marathon Man, there’s a famous scene with the quote, “Is it safe?” Azul has just ensured that the answer to that question is yes when posed about running an application on Java SE 8 that transfers data across a network. In a networked environment, it…
Although Java started life targeted at desktops, its popularity has really grown to dominate the server and subsequently cloud spaces. Many people would dismiss Java on the desktop, but you would be surprised at the number of people and organisations still using it. The reality of “Write once, run anywhere” dramatically simplifies the deployment of…
TechRepublic recently published an article about languages that developers love and those that they hate. This produced an interesting set of results since Java was the third most loved language as well as the second most hated. Clearly, Java, as a language, polarises opinion. When I tweeted about this, I got one reply which quoted…
There was an interesting discussion on the Java Champions alias recently under the title, “Fear of Java”. The initial post was related to a University faculty that was evaluating which version of Java to use. Given the issue that it brought up, I thought it was worth discussing in a blog post. I’ll quote…
It occurred to me recently that I had just passed a substantial milestone in my career. I started working for Sun Microsystems in February 1996 but, at that time, with Java being so new my role was to help drive adoption of Solaris on Intel with major ISVs like Oracle, Informix and Lotus Notes (hands…
Four big things are happening in April 2019 that I can think of right now: On the 25th we have the release of Avengers: Endgame. For anyone who’s a Marvel fan, this is big news, especially the way that Avengers: Infinity War ended. I think it’s going to take some pretty creative writing to get…
I’ve written several blog posts that list out all the changes for each of the most recent releases of Java (JDK 10, JDK 11). With JDK 12 just having been released, it seemed the obvious thing to produce another blog in this series. I’ll be doing the flip side of this later, which is the…
Around the middle of the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the metal movable-type printing press. I think it would be easy to argue that this was one of the most significant inventions in history for enabling widespread access to information; something today we take very much for granted. The metal type pieces of Gutenberg’s press…
