Oracle Announces Java SE 7 204
vivin writes "Oracle has announced the release of Java SE 7. This is the first release of Java under the stewardship of Oracle."
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Oracle Announces Java SE 7
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The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
Will they sue me if I install it?
Re:lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you change a few things around and name it after a fishing village in Iceland [wikipedia.org] to try to get out of paying royalties for mobile Java.
Project Lambda (Score:4, Insightful)
Project lambda [java.net] was arguably the most important planned addition to the JDK7, but apparently got dropped in the last few months and pushed back to JDK8. To be honest Project Coin [java.net], Fork/Join, and InvokeDynamic are useful, but not much of a big deal as Project Lambda.
Re:lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Dalvik is not java. One is stack on is register based, they will not use each others byte code.
Did you ever imagine? (Score:4, Insightful)
There would be someone out there that would make Bill Gates seem like a nice guy.
Re:Annnnd? (Score:2, Insightful)
Other lightweight open source alternatives are Mozilla SpiderMonkey, GHCI (interactive Haskell interpreter), the Python VM, and the Perl VM, the Ruby VM, Parrot (does Perl, Python, and Ruby bytecode) and Emacs. Unfortunately, I don't see people writing web applications using Python or Perl (except for the back-end maybe). Emacs was once great, but lack of proper graphical interface programming means it is forever stuck in its niche as a text editor. Everything is changing over to JavaScript, so that leaves us with SpiderMonkey as the only hope for an open source VM (Google's V8 is not open source) that is both widely used and specially tuned for executing a popular programming language. But you can't really call JavaScript an alternative to Java, because the two technologies are so different.
The advantage of a virtual machine is that it isolates execution into a safe environment, but this advantage is superficial: since the VM increase the complexity of the application, it actually makes the attack surface larger and less secure. The only real advantage of using a VM is that it allows you to essentially outsource the job of porting the platform-specific implementation details of your software to the company that provides your virtual machine. And since Java is provided by Oracle, IBM, and Google (through Android), there is enough competition to keep Java technology fresh and modern (unless the patent wars wreck everything). And that is the best thing about Java: its popular, mature, and implemented by several huge and competing corporations. It's a shame that Java never integrated with browsers too well, and that's why Java lost out to JavaScript in the cloud computing world. Java is still an essential part of the enterprise though.