News that Oracle Corp. plans to deprecate the Java browser plug-in in JDK 9 prompted a rousing chorus of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" from the Internet last week. But the news came as no surprise. A growing number of browser vendors have either stopped supporting the plug-in or announced plans to do so. (Flash and Silverlight, too.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20160 comments
We're only a month into 2016 and it's already shaping up to be another lively year for enterprise developers. Mobile, cloud, DevOps, IoT, microservices, the API economy, cognitive computing, virtual reality -- all are reshaping organizations in fundamental ways, and it looks like devs are going to have a large role to play in that change.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 29, 20160 comments
As we reported earlier, Java won TIOBE's annual popularity contest for 2015, and came in a close second among languages used on GitHub, even though everybody and his brother seemed to be predicting Java's decline last year. This is why covering this beat often makes my head hurt. How can Java be on its way out when it's more popular than ever?
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 27, 20160 comments
My annual, informal survey of industry watchers about challenges and opportunities for enterprise developers in the coming year led me this year to a group of Forrester analysts (Jeffrey S. Hammond, Kurt Bittner, John R. Rymer, Diego Lo Giudice, Jost Hoppermann, John M. Wargo, Randy Heffner and Michael Facemire) who made some predictions back in November in a must-read report, "Predictions 2016: Modern Development Goes Mainstream").
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 22, 20160 comments
The impact of Google's decision to use Oracle's OpenJDK in upcoming versions of its Android OS remains to be seen, but reaction to the news in the tech community has been cautiously optimistic.
RedMonk analyst James Governor's take was typical: "[A]fter a long hiatus, Java is finally improved with some significant new functionality -- notably lambdas in Java 8," he observed in an e-mail. "Java, the language, still has strong legs, as RedMonk data clearly show, and it makes sense for Google to embrace that ecosystem's ongoing strength. OpenJDK has made considerable progress as a community and codebase, so why not tap into that momentum?"
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 12, 20160 comments
Whatever else you can say about the past year, 2015 was a good'n for Java. The language turned 20 with much fanfare and well-earned acknowledgement. (Oracle marked the anniversary with a great Web site. Java 8, with its game-changing support for lambda expressions, was adopted at a record-setting pace. And though the release of Java 9 was pushed back, modularization became real.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 7, 20160 comments
The Open Container Initiative (OCI) unveiled its technical governance model this week. The nascent coalition of industry leaders and users seeking to establish common standards for software containers is just over six months old, and the establishment of a governance model is a big step in its evolution.
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Posted by John K. Waters on December 9, 20150 comments
GitLab, the company behind the open source code collaboration platform of the same name, has released a new version of one of its Git-based offerings with some additional enterprise muscle, and the company is using the occasion to throw stats at the press like ninja stars in a Kung Fu movie.
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Posted by John K. Waters on December 2, 20150 comments
The Chief Architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, Mark Reihold, is asking for a six-month extension of the Java 9 release schedule. The reason: Jigsaw, of course.
Despite the "good progress" made over the past 18 months on the project that will modularize Java, Reinhold said in a post on the OpenJDK mailing list, doing it right will take just a little bit longer.
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Posted by John K. Waters on December 1, 20150 comments