Category: Kev’s Blog

Posted on

JavaOne 2016: Oracle’s ‘refocusing’ of the EE8 proposal

Oracle’s planned Java EE ‘announcement‘ at JavaOne 2016 turned out to be (based on the announcement from the Sunday keynote and the Java EE 8 roadmap session by Linda Demichiel, EE spec lead for EE JSRs) a ‘refocusing’, a realignment to bring Java EE more in line with current trends, particularly to support deploying EE applications to the cloud and the development of microservices.

So what exactly is going to change? For the new EE8 spec proposal, with finalization now planned for 2017,  some previously proposed features for inclusion are now going to be dropped, namely:

  • MVC 1.0
  • JMS 2.1
  • EE Management apis 2.0

Given than MVC 1.0 was a new EE web framework as an alternative to JSF (not adding new technology but built on top of what we already have with a Reference Implementation already built out), this is perhaps the most surprising removal. Given the new focus of cloud and microservices however, this makes sense, as it doesn’t really add anything towards supporting the new goals.

Everything else in the original EE8 JSR 366 is going to remain in the new EE8 proposal.

New features to be added include a new feature for supporting Health Checks, and a new Configuration proposal to standardize external configuration of deployments – both of which will be useful to support deployments to the cloud.

Is this ‘refocusing’ enough? Is it going to be finalized soon enough? For an EE8 target of 2017, and EE9 of 2018, is it too little, too late?

Given that you can use current EE features today with frameworks like Spring Boot and Dropwizard to build and deploy microservices, is a standardized cloud/microservice focused EE platform still relevant?

Alternative runtimes like WildFly Swarm and IBM’s Liberty Profile are giving runtime flexibility and allow you to pick just the features your app needs at runtime (and are available today). Rather than an all-in-one EE runtime container, is a ‘pick n mix’ type approach more relevant to support the current popularity of microservices?

Posted on

Notes from Raspberry Pi with Java 9 session – CON6210 – JavaOne 2016

A few interesting notes from the Java 9 Embedded on Raspberry Pi, session CON6210, presented by Stephen Chin.

Currently streaming live on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v95y5CzvcZ4&feature=youtu.be

Full live stream schedule is here: https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-1005786

  • SE9 Embedded will be available in a ARM build for the Raspberry Pi
  • This ARM specific build will only be available for Pi 2 and 3 (not the original Pi 1 A/B and + models, as it’s been compiled for ARM Thumb-2 instructions, and these are only supported on Pi 2 ARM CPU and above
  • AWT, Swing and JavaFX will all be supported on SE9 Embedded on the Pi
  • Interesting side note about modular Jigsaw in SE9 – apparently the module file packaging and compression is moving away from zip based Jars, to another format that’s more efficient for class lookup/retrieval
Posted on

Learning by doing

I’m often asked ‘how do I learn [insert something new here]?’, or ‘what approach do you use for learning something new?’. You can learn many ways, we all have different styles of learning so you should experiment to find out what works for you

In software development, learning by doing should never be ignored as a useful technique. It’s one thing to learn something at a high level by listening to a podcast, reading something online or in a book, but the next step if you really want to learn the ins and outs is to do it yourself.

Here’s an example of why this approach is valuable. You overhear a guy talking about how a machine is turned on: ‘to turn on the machine you press this button’. Some time later someone else asks you how to turn on the machines, and remembering the conversation earlier, ‘you press this button here’ – the other guy presses it, and nothing happens. Huh, what went wrong?

If you’d tried to turn on the machine yourself earlier you would have found out, probably by trial and error, that there’s a key and it needs to be turned to the ‘on’ position before you press the button. There’s no way you would have learned this just by the earlier conversation, but if you’d tried to turn on the machine yourself, if the key was in the ‘off’ position then the button wouldn’t have worked and so you would have started to investigate further, get the manual, or go and find the other guy and ask some questions.

This is rather contrived example to make a point, and how much detail you need or want to know about any given topic of course varies. However, in software development, I don’t think anyone would argue that you don’t learn to program by reading a book; you learn by doing, you learn by writing code. Go write some code, you might learn something.

Proudly powered by WordPress