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Oracle Java Programming

Oracle Announces Java 14 (zdnet.com) 54

Posted by EditorDavid from the six-month-cycles dept.
Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 programming language spec." Rolling out in line with Oracle's six-monthly release schedule that began with Java 9 in 2017, JDK 14 includes enhancements that Oracle says will improve developer productivity... According to Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java Platform, the faster six-monthly releases are helping developers adopt new features more rapidly due to regular expected changes. Java 9, for example, was released more than three years after Java 8...

Saab notes that major improvements in JDK 14 include a Foreign-Memory Access API enhancement (JEP 370), and improvements from Project Amber, another OpenJDK project, including Pattern Matching (JEP 305) and a preview of Records (JEP 359). Oracle JDK 14 will receive at least two quarterly updates in line with Oracle's critical-patch update schedule before Java 15 is released in September 2020.

Oracle is providing Java 14 as the Oracle OpenJDK release under an open-source GNU General Public License v2. It's also released under a commercial license using Oracle JDK. Most of the nearly 2,000 fixes in JDK 14 have been made by Oracle employees while 528 came from individual developers and other organizations. Some of the main contributors included Red Hat, SAP, Google, Arm, Intel, and NTT Data.
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Oracle Announces Java 14

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  • The most hated language? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @11:11AM (#59856614)

    I keep reading about the ascendancy of this or that language every few weeks. Python. Javascript. Go. Typescript. All "rapidly increasing" at one point or another poised to take over everything.

    That is usually followed by screeds about how old and outdated and stodgy Java is. It is this generation's COBOL. And above all how Oracle's ownership of it is going to kill it once and for all. Any time now wait and see.

    Yet here we are, another major release and most of the world's economy seems to run on it. And no signs of it fracturing due to non-openness anytime soon.

    • Re:The most hated language? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @11:18AM (#59856638) Journal

      The problem is the metrics. Using repositories to count which language is the most popular skews the results heavily. We all know that C/C++ and Java are king.

      • It depends on how you view it. If we go with how many devices run a particular language then javascript is the clear winner because it runs on all platforms and everyone uses it daily.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by theCoder ( 23772 )

          Is it the clear winner? All of that Javascript is interpreted by code written in some other language, either C or C++. And that code likely uses libraries written in C (like libc, libjpeg, etc). And all of that interfaces to a kernel written in C (whether that is Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, etc).

          I don't know if it is possible to even estimate, but it would be interesting to see how much CPU time is spent running code from each language. CPU time isn't great either, as it would promote slow languages. But

          • My point is that Javascript runs on all platforms, but not all platforms are based on the same language (C/C++ for Linux and BSD, .NET for Windows, Java for Android, Swift for macOS and iOS, etc) Javascript was the most used.

        • Javascript is the clear loser because of the bulk of software written in it is of very low or negative value. Web marketing spew, privacy invasive tracking, malware, adware, cpu cycle wasting ads, truly javascript is the shit at the bottom of the barrel.

      • Re:The most hated language? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Quantum gravity ( 2576857 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @05:24PM (#59857584)
        A common rating of top programming languages is:
        1. Java
        2. C
        3. Python
        4. C++
        5. C#
        There are variations, but this is according to https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in... [tiobe.com] from March 2020.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GbrDead ( 702506 )
        > We all know that C/C++ and Java are co-emperors.

        FTFY
    • You don't need oracle when there is openJDK which performs better than oracles standard install now.

    • Re:The most hated language? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @12:21PM (#59856838)

      it's even funnier than that, back end of the world's economy runs on COBOL and java is for middleware and new apps

    • It's the programming language of Android so I guess it has a lot of developers.

      Does that make it "the most popular"? I guess it does if you're a Java evangelist.

      • Does "most popular" mean most lines of code? Does it m allrann most used? Does it mean "most admired"? From an infrastructure point of view, C/C++ and Java are behemoths.

        • I'm not sure how seriously to take somebody who still lumps "C/C++" together into a single language but both of those have the advantage of not dragging a mastadon-sized take-it-or-leave-it library of corporate APIs along with them.

      • Oracle wants to kill Android

      • No one really uses Java for Android. They use c++ for performance reasons and do the wrappers to the calls in Java. Android development is a mess as a result of that terrible language

        • I admit this is what I did when I did some development on Android.

          Bonus: The C++/OpenGL part ran on IOS as well... C++ rules them all.

      • Thought Android switched to Kotlin?

    • Just like the United States...least worst (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @01:40PM (#59857044)
      Java is just like the United States from an American perspective. You can complain about it endlessly and say how Sweden or Canada is better, but in the end you live here. America sucks and has lots of room for improvement and much to learn from the rest of the world...and everyplace else sucks more. That may not be true in the future, but for the present, there's a reason so many people and businesses want to be here....love it or hate it.

      I work in Java all day. I work in Python and JavaScript and SQL and HTML and have dabbled in Go, C, etc. They all suck more for business development. I am particularly horrified at JavaScript, Java's heir apparent. I've seen builds break because my node/npm was 2 weeks behind someone else's with vague, catastrophic, and cryptic errors.

      Every time I have to run something in Python, it's a dramatic event. Oh...a system update...now the code that you ran in MacOS no longer runs on the newest patch of Ubuntu. With Java, things are REALLY REALLY REALLY deterministic. You write it, with few exceptions,...it works the same across all versions and all platforms. When I work in Java, once it is compiled, I NEVER think about it again. It just works. I have libraries from the 90s I still use....they run faster and better than they did in the 90s and were compiled in java 1.0 back when Limp Bizkit was on the radio and you were playing Nintendo 64.

      Java is the least worst option when you have real work to do. When you have a team that can fit in a minivan or it's your personal project, the stakes are low....do whatever you want, brag about how much better your technology platform is than Java.

      Nearly every company that does writes code in other languages ends up on Java for some portion of backend work. It performs really well and is extremely reliable and deterministic. It's a good investment. Professionals write code to serve those who pay them...not to have a fun journey. Java may not be a fun journey for asshole hipsters (I like it a lot), but it works well and gives the best return on investment. If you write it correctly today, you can use the compiled libs for decades in the future...no drama, it just works.

      So many are so focused on innovation, they skip the lessons from the past. Maybe because Java evolved from C++ and smalltalk and tried to learn from their example?...maybe that's why they're so successful. I can see the JavaScript ecosystem definitely didn't learn from Java and keeps repeating the mistakes they fixed decades ago.

      So yeah, I am sure you have some complaint about Java you TOTALLY think is valid and why everyone who runs it is stupid, but if you did real work for a living, you'd know things aren't so simple. Sometimes Java does really suck...it just sucks less than all the other choices when real money is on the line and you have a real job.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Err...you do realize that Javascript and Java are used for different things, right?

        • Err...you do realize that Javascript and Java are used for different things, right?

          Server-side NodeJS is trying to be Java and having done real projects in both, I'd say failing hard. It was a nightmare with time. It started out just fine, but as you add people...so many stupid bugs a compiler would have caught slipped in and had to be found by QA and on rare occasion, users.

      • I work in infrastructure IT. I HATE JAVA! Tell how it's logical to re-image computers to get a website to load?

        Yes I have had to do that.

        For a simple website to load you need to ship the PC to me while I have to send a loaner and wait 2 weeks while I back up the data, image, and reload all because I had to go in the registry to tell IE to check Java plugin version (not jre version) to get legacy 2003 era Oracle to work.

        IE is so buggy and the only FUCKING browser that works with Java and if you put in the wr

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dshk ( 838175 )
          You are talking about the Java Browser Plugin, not Java. This is like complaining about Linux because Gimp has two many windows. Working with the Java Browser Plugin is indeed terrible now, becase it is legacy, no modern browser supports it. I know, I have a vm with an old OS and an old browser to control a few 10+ year old devices. (On the other hand browsers do try to reinvent the Java Virtual Machine and Java byte codes, see WebAssembly. And again, Java Virtual Machine is not linked to the Java programm

      • Or use c# instead. It continues to just work.

    • That is usually followed by screeds about how old and outdated and stodgy Java is.
      Well, Java 14 is brand new ...

  • So What? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tmshort ( 1097127 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @11:25AM (#59856660)

    With their licensing, companies are trying to move off of Java, or at least away from Oracle to OpenJDK.

    • Re:So What? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @11:45AM (#59856704)

      I've noticed this. Sun's business models for Java failed, and seem to be dropped by Oracle, which is moving its support to OpenJDK development. The Oracle feature changes are published at:

      https://blogs.oracle.com/javam... [oracle.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        I see whatever Oracle posts as some kind of attempt to validate themselves and failing due to obnoxious licensing strategies.

        • The last time I spoke with an Oracle representative, they implied but did not put in writing that they were switching Java development to OpenJDK. I'm not deeply enough involved in Java development to attend those developer conferences. Is anyone here meeting with Oracle and has their Java development roadmap which they can share?

    • Re:So What? (Score:4, Informative)

      by kelzer ( 83087 ) on Saturday March 21, 2020 @01:33PM (#59857026) Homepage

      I don't know of too many companies that would spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of dollars to "move off of Java", i.e., rewrite everything from scratch in a different language.

      They search for alternatives, like using Amazon Corretto - a free, supported version of Java based on OpenJDK. Amazon is taking security fixes for newer OpenJDK versions and backporting them to Java 8 and Java 11 so that companies with a significant Java investment can continue to use those versions without paying the high support costs that Oracle is charging.

      A lot of people don't understand that OpenJDK is controlled by Oracle. It's Oracle's developers supporting the project. And hence, the lack of security fixes for older OpenJDK releases.

    • If Oracle succeeds in it's lawsuit against Google, what are the implications for OpenSDK?

    • With their licensing, companies are trying to move off of Java, or at least away from Oracle to OpenJDK.

      Says some random not-a-java-developer on the internets.

      OpenJDK is just the upstream open source end of Oracle Java. For all intents and purposes, it's the same thing, plus/minus some parts that are not worth the time to explain. I hate telling you this, but Oracle licked OpenJDK, so you still have Oracle cooties, and it's still Java.

      Where do you think people are "moving" to from Java anyway?

  • ...after 'Oracle ...'

  • It's time for this giant to fall.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Too bad Java is so incompatible with itself that not only will it not run on newer Java but requires specific plugin versions with specific jre versions to load the applets in IE

  • We are busy migrating away from Java. I will be happy when it's gone. Not the language itself but the ecosystem.

  • Fuck Oracle and Java; they sue everybody for stupid shit. Use C#, MS has been about 40% less evil than Oracle of late.

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