The development of the Java programming language going forward will emphasize support for modern computing platforms including GPUs and containers, Oracle revealed in a presentation on March 21. Among other things, the company’s plans call for ensuring that Java provides strong support for GPUs and hardware acceleration, which will be key to supporting machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads.

The Java SE (Standard Edition) development team at Oracle want to configure Java such that the JVM will understand which workloads should run on the GPU and which should run on the CPU. GPUs, while initially built for image processing, are increasingly being used for number-crunching applications, machine learning, and even databases.

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Cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes promise to be a hedge against cloud lock-in. A new open-source project, Tekton, offers a Kubernetes-native framework for quickly building CI/CD systems that run anywhere Kubernetes runs. Plus, Tekton will work with existing CI/CD servers such as Jenkins. 

Mobile solutions provider Gluon has released JavaFX 12, the company’s second release of the rich client technology for Java since JavaFX was decoupled from the JDK (Java Development Kit).

The popular but troubled Jenkins CI/CD system is being reworked to support cloud-native applications on the Kubernetes container-orchestration platform. The Jenkins X project is a response to user concerns that Jenkins had lost its luster and had developed configuration and stability issues.

Jenkins X is intended for Kubernetes users who want to adopt CI/CD or who want CI/CD and are moving to the cloud, without necessarily knowing anything about Kubernetes. Jenkins X builds on Jenkins with open source tools, promoting a Git branching and a repository model. A Jenkins distribution is used as the core CI/CD engine.

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In this post, we'll continue exploring XML and JSON in Java 11 and beyond.

Examples in this post will introduce you to JSON-B, the JSON Binding API for Java. After a quick overview and installation instruction, I'll show you how to use JSON-B to serialize and deserialize Java objects, arrays, and collections; how to customize serialization and deserialization using JSON-B; and how to use JSON-B adapters to convert source objects to target objects during serialization or deserialization.

The material for this post is completely new, but could be considered an additional chapter (Chapter 13) for my new book, recently published by Apress: Java XML and JSON, Second Edition.

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Red Hat is looking to bring Java into more-modern computing paradigms by providing a tool tuned to Kubernetes and serverless environments.

Currently in beta, Red Hat’s open source Quarkus framework is aimed at a container-first, cloud-native world. It uses a unified reactive and imperative programming model to address distributed application architectures such as microservices and serverless. Java can be challenging to run in serverless environments, where compute services are called on demand.

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Developers new to Java often wonder what differentiates the Java Virtual Machine, the Java Development Kit, and the Java Runtime Environment. They're also curious how these three Java platform components work together in Java applications. Finally, developers need to know how they will interact with each component.

Briefly:

• The JVM is the Java platform component that executes your programs.
• The JRE creates the JVM and ensures dependencies are available to your programs.
• The JDK allows you to create Java programs that can be executed and run by the JVM and JRE.

As a developer, you'll work with the JDK to write your applications and with the JVM to debug and optimize them, especially for performance. The JRE mostly runs in the background, but you may use it for application monitoring and memory configuration.

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XML and JSON are important to me, and I'm grateful to Apress for letting me write an entire book about them. In this Java Q&A post I will briefly introduce the second edition of my new book, Java XML and JSON. I'll also present two useful demos that I would have liked to include in the book if I'd had space for them.

First, I'll show you how to override Xalan, which is the standard XSLT implementation for Java 11, with an XSLT 2.0+ and XPath 2.0+-compatible alternative, in this case SAXON. Using SAXON for XSLT/XPath makes it much easier to access features such as grouping, which I'll also demonstrate. Next, I'll show you two ways to convert XML to JSON with Jackson: the first technique is data binding, the second is tree traversal.

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SAP has released a “friendly fork” of open source Java, called SapMachine.

The project, which began in December 2017, serves as a downstream version of OpenJDK maintained by SAP. SAP customers and partners can use it to run their applications. OpenJDK is the open source version of Java.

Bringing on a new developer to a programming project with many dependencies can sometimes be a nightmare. I’ve seen an extreme case where the company finally gave up and bought the developer a new computer after a month of issues trying to configure his old one. More commonly, setting up a new development environment for a new developer might take between three days and two weeks.

That issue is one of the motivations for web-based developer workspaces. Another motivation is that machines for local development need significant CPU and RAM resources, which increase the cost of hardware; those resources allow the developer to build the project expeditiously. Computers for accessing web-based workspaces can get away with lower-end hardware than computers for local development.

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Janet, a functional and imperative language as well as bytecode interpreter, is being developed as a general-purpose platform for expressive code. The language, named after a character from the TV show The Good Place, consists of the core library, interpreter, compiler, and assembler. 

A Lisp version implemented in a previous C standard known as C99, the beta Janet language takes features from Lua and Clojure. It can serve as a scripting language or be embedded in other programs. Janet is suitable for prototyping and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and it can be ported to other systems.

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In honor of President's Day, HP's online store has slashed prices up to 56% on various items, with free shipping included. On the list is the HP Pavilion Laptop - 15T which has been discounted $420 down to $579.99.  The budget-friendly 14z laptop is even budget-friendlier at just $189.99, down from $329.99. The HP Probook 640 G4 Notebook PC is slashed 53% from $1310 to just $609. There are many more discounts as well, so browse the full list of deals at HP's online store right here.

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Java developers would be clued in to race conditions in their projects, if a thread sanitizer proposed comes to fruition.

Project Tsan, proposed in the OpenJDK community, would explore and incubate a thread-sanitizing feature that would be integrated into the HotSpot JVM and the JVM tool interface.

Java Development Kit (JDK) 13 is beginning to take shape, and the first beta builds are available. Its production release is planned for September 2019.

A complete beginner's guide to Android Studio, from installing Android Studio to coding and debugging your first Android app. Includes troubleshooting tips for the Android device emulator and source code for the Android example app.

Vasabii / Getty Images

PART 1:
Installation + setup

Get system requirements and instructions for installing Android Studio 3.x and launching your first Android project. You'll start up your first Android project and get to know Android Studio's main window.

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Updated: February 2019.

Android Studio offers a rich palette of built-in development tools, and an even more abundant plugin ecosystem. The first three articles in this series focused on installation and setup and coding and running a simple mobile app with Android Studio. Now you'll get acquainted with some of the more advanced tools: three built-in tools and three plugins for debugging and improving the quality and productivity of your Android application code.

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Updated: February 2019.

In Android Studio for beginners, Part 2, you created your first animated mobile app using Android Studio. Now, Part 3 will take you through the steps to build and run the app in an Android device emulator or live device.

We'll first use Gradle to build the app's application package (APK) file. Then I'll show you how to set up and run the app on an Android device emulator or an actual device, in this case a Kindle Fire tablet. I'll also show you how I resolved a couple of issues with Android Studio's device emulator setup, including the infamous Timed out while waiting error.

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Updated: February 2019.

In Part 1 of this beginner's introduction to Android Studio, you set up Android Studio in your development environment and got to know the user interface. Now, in Part 2, you'll code your first app.

The animated mobile app consists of a single activity, which presents Google's Android robot character and a button for animating the character. Clicking the button causes the character to gradually change color from green to red to blue, then back to green. While the app isn't especially useful, writing it will help you get comfortable with using Android Studio. In Part 3, you'll build and run the app using an Android device emulator and a Kindle Fire tablet.

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Updated: February 2019.

For some years now it's been clear that Android is a force to be reckoned with in the mobile OS landscape. This Java-based technology has sparked a new gold rush, with programmers competing to make money from their mobile apps. Android jobs are also plentiful, as shown by a quick job search using Indeed.com.

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