Java Posts of Interest - 19 October 2011

JavaOne 2011 and announcements from JavaOne have been big news recently in the world of Java. However, there are some other Java-related posts of interest that are not directly related to JavaOne 2011 that have been of interest and I reference and briefly summarize some of them here.

Java SE 7 Update 1 Available

Java SE 7 Update 1 is now available for download and contains numerous security fixes. The article Oracle patches Java flaw exploited in SSL BEAST attack states that Oracle-provided security fixes have led to Mozilla deciding not to block Java in Firefox.

JDK 7 Adoption Guide

The JDK 7 Adoption Guide has been recently highlighted on the Oracle Technology Network page. It provides a concise summary for each of several categories of enhancements such as Java language enhancements and JVM enhancements. The JDK 7 Adoption Guide also lists the versions of specifications included with JDK 7. For example, it states that "JDK 7 now supports JAXB 2.2.3" and "JDK 7 now supports JAX-WS 2.2.4." It also contains links to other references with greater details such as Java SE 7 Features and Enhancements, Java SE 7 and JDK 7 Compatibility, JDK 7 Release Notes, and New JDK 7 Feature: Support for Dynamically Typed Languages in the Java Virtual Machine.

javatuples 1.2 Released

The release of javatuples 1.2 was announced on 15 October 2011. Its main page describes the project: "javatuples is one of the simplest java libraries ever made. Its aim is to provide a set of java classes that allow you to work with tuples."

Java Losing Popularity Among Developers

Paul Krill begins Survey: Java losing popularity among developers with this sentence: "Despite the recent release of a major upgrade to the platform, Java is losing popularity based on the latest monthly assessment of programming languages by Tiobe Software." His article's subtitle adds, "If recent trends continue, C could supplant Java as the most popular programming language by next month."

UPDATE: Kevin Farnham has posted an interesting analysis of the programming language trends indicated in the Tiobe index referenced in this article ("Is Java Really Losing Popularity Among Developers?"). Significant interest has been generated in this java.net editorial as evidenced by the reddit comments (nearly 325 comments as of this writing).

NetBeans 7.1 Beta Released

NetBeans 7.1 beta was released in conjunction with JavaFX 2.0's release. I used NetBeans 7.1 beta to implement a Hello JavaFX 2.0 example.

Securing Java Code - Exceptions

Roman Kennke's Securing Java code – Exceptions advises, "When you want to put some interesting information in an exception to make your debugging life easier, think really hard to restrict the amount of information as much as necessary and to not expose any information that could be used by an attacker." I jave seen similar issues to the one Kennke describes in which exceptions provide a lot of detail on how a particular system is implemented. A stack trace is a great tool, but its value can be as great for hackers as for developers. The "offending" stack trace doesn't have to be part of an exception to provide dangerously valuable details. I blogged previously on how I've seen significant implementation details of Flash applications which debug accidentally left on.

Fix Common Java Exceptions

Fix Common Java Exceptions offers brief descriptions of regularly encountered standard Java exceptions such as ClassCastException, ClassNotFoundException, InvalidClassException, and NullPointerException.

Conclusion

The aftermath of JavaOne 2011 continues to include numerous interesting and insightful posts and articles about Java.