Oracle's Java Platform Group created a March Madness-style bracket to mark Java's 25th anniversary, substituting JEPs for the college basketball teams and using Twitter polls to determine the winners of the matchups.
The "Best of the JDK Feature Face-Off" concluded last week, with JDK Mission Control edging Records in the final round.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 16, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation has been busy since the organization announced its move to Belgium last month. It announced the first milestone release of Jakarta EE 9, and published a white paper about open source in Europe and it just posted the results of its 2020 Jakarta EE Developer Survey.
Based on the responses of several thousand enterprise developer, the survey provides a fascinating look at the growth of open source enterprise Java, as well as some details on what developer interest in things like microservices and platforms.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 25, 20200 comments
Oracle kicked off its celebration of Java's 25th anniversary, which arrived officially on Saturday, with ... you guessed it: online content. It's disappointing not to be able to celebrate the language and platform that is, let's face it, running world IRL. But Big Red mounted an able effort on its "Moved-by-Java" site with inspiring personal stories from its Java team and the larger Java community, many of which are genuinely inspiring. If you haven't already, be sure to check it out.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 29, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation is moving its headquarters to Belgium, the organization has just revealed. One of the world's leading open-source software foundations, steward of the Eclipse IDE, enterprise Java, and the Eclipse MicroProfile, and the heart of a global ecosystem of developers, companies, and public sector entities, is pulling up stakes and heading for Brussels.
Well, figuratively speaking.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 13, 20200 comments
Red Hat has been making a lot of news over the past two weeks, with product and services announcements fairly gushing from the Red Hat Summit online event last week, as well as IBM's online Think event, which is wrapping up today.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 7, 20200 comments
Now that you're working from home and not spending all that time on a daily commute or regular showers, instead of binge-watching back episodes of Rick and Morty, you might want to use that time to up-level your skillset with some online education -- much of which is suddenly very affordable.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 23, 20200 comments
Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic: increased demand for COBOL programmers. The need seems to be particularly acute among states whose unemployment systems were originally written in the decades-old language -- systems suddenly tasked with processing a record number of unemployment claims. Estimates vary, but it's safe to say that there are a couple hundred billion lines of COBOL code currently in use. And it seems to be gumming up the works.
This news should provoke a bit of déjà vu in more than a few IT industry watchers. Remember Y2K? People were calling it the COBOL Programmers' Re-employment Act, as companies worldwide begged and bribed a virtually retired community to help them make changes to this language nobody seemed to understand anymore.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 16, 20200 comments
Java's silver anniversary is right around the corner; in May, the venerable language undergirding acres of the enterprise and still supported by a community of more than seven million developers turns 25. But Java wasn't the only technology hitting the mainstream in 1995. The folks at Red Hat sent me a list of ground-breaking technology platforms, which, "taken as a whole, are the ancestral equivalent of the way we work, play, and live today." The idea was "to put Java and its birth-year brethren in context."
Cool idea.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 15, 20200 comments
Calling all coders! The world needs you now to save us from COVID-19! Or to put it in less panicky, running-out-of-TP, could-we-eat-the-cat-if-we-had-to terms, we could all use a dose of your smarts and skill to help with this immediate, life-or-death challenge.
Yes, I'm talking about the third annual Call for Code Global Challenge, which is something of a clarion call to software developers around the world -- from crusty engineers to baby-faced programmers and everyone in between -- to pool their talents to address some of society's biggest challenges. Climate change has been a focus of The Challenge in the past, but in March of this year, the organizers announced that they would be expanding that focus to include both climate change and COVID-19.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 9, 20200 comments