The latest update of the Java Development Kit (JDK 18) goes GA next week, and though it's not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, it does implement nine JEPs (listed here). And while it's probably also true that your organization is going to want you to wait for the LTS coming in September 2023 (JDK 21), the JEPs implemented in this release are worth a look.
I joined a Zoom presser this week with two Java mavens, Simon Ritter and Steve Poole, to talk about the latest incarnation of the JDK and what it brings to developers.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 16, 20220 comments
It's less than two years old, but the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF,) a cross-industry group hosted at the Linux Foundation, is attracting an impressive (and growing) roster of members signing up to pitch in on efforts to identify and fix security vulnerabilities in open-source software (OSS), while improving everything from tooling and training to research and vulnerability disclosure practices.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 2, 20220 comments
I recently had a great Tech Talk with Stephen Walters, Solution Architect at xMatters, which was recently acquired by Everbridge ("DevSecOps: Securely Navigating a Shifting Landscape"). Among his other credentials, Stephen is a DevOps Institute Ambassador, so when I saw that the Institute's lineup for 2022 events and webinars included plans for two new DevOps certifications, I just had to pass along the news.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 20, 20220 comments
You'd think I'd have seen it coming. All the signs were there. There was the day Microsoft announced that it had joined the OpenJDK project back in 2019. Then there was the company's decision to upgrade its status at the Eclipse Foundation to Strategic Member in August of this year. And when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed in September that "We use more Java than one can imagine," I just should have known that Redmond would soon be joining the venerable technology standards and specifications organization behind the evolution of the Java language and platform, the Java Community Process (JCP).
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Posted by John K. Waters on November 16, 20210 comments
The Eclipse Foundation today announced the launch of a top-level project to develop a new open-source, vendor-neutral OS designed to provide an alternative to existing IoT and edge operating systems.
Called Oniro, the new OS is an implementation of OpenHarmony, a distributed multi-kernel operating system developed by OpenAtom, China’s first open-source foundation. The purpose of Oniro is to provide the same operating system across a much wider range of devices, Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told me, such as a tiny leak sensor in a home and a Raspberry Pi.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 26, 20210 comments
IBM Research added to its growing family of "trusted AI" tools recently with the release of a new open-source developer toolkit called Uncertainty Qualification 360 (UQ360). The new toolkit focuses on what IBM believes will be the next big area of advancing trust in artificial intelligence: communicating an AI's "uncertainty."
Uncertainty quantification is just what it sounds like: a determination of the level of confidence an AI system has in its decisions. The new UQ360 toolkit was designed to give data science practitioners and developers a set of algorithms to streamline the process of quantifying, evaluating, improving, and communicating uncertainty of machine learning models.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 6, 20210 comments
Microsoft has amped up its support of Java developers by expanding its participation in the Eclipse Foundation to become a Strategic Member, the company announced this week.
Microsoft's Stephen Walli, principal program manager in the Azure Office of the CTO, will be joining the foundation's board of directors.
"The Eclipse Foundation is expanding its role through working groups and many of these working groups are important to Microsoft and its partners," Walli said in a blog post. "Recent work around the Eclipse Dataspace Connector and Eclipse Tractus-X are examples of new work beginning at the Eclipse Foundation in working groups in which Microsoft has an interest in participating."
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 4, 20210 comments
The Eclipse Foundation today announced the formation of the Eclipse IDE Working Group, a new community-driven initiative that will "support the continued evolution, adoption, and sustainability of the Eclipse IDE suite of products, related technologies, and ecosystem."
Specifically, the new working group will provide governance, guidance, and funding for the communities that support the delivery and maintenance of Eclipse IDE products. The stated goals of the group are "to ensure the continued success, vibrancy, quality and sustainability of the Eclipse Platform, desktop IDE and underlying technologies, including related planning and delivery processes, as well as related delivery technology."
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 17, 20210 comments
Lightbend, the company behind the Scala JVM language and developer of the Reactive Platform, today unveiled "a unique, first-of-its-kind Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering" for cloud native application development.
I put quotation marks around that marketing phrase (it's a reflex), but the newly available Akka Serverless does look to be a unique offering.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 10, 20210 comments