Recent Java Developments - Late April 2018

There have been several recent developments in the Java-sphere this week and I summarize some of them in this post.

The End of JavaOne as We Know It

In the post "JavaOne Event Expands with More Tracks, Languages and Communities – and New Name," Stephen Chin writes, "The JavaOne conference is expanding to create a new, bigger event that’s inclusive to more languages, technologies and developer communities." He adds that it has been renamed to "Oracle Code One" and that this year's edition (the "inaugural year of Oracle Code One") will be held in San Francisco's Moscone West in late October (October 22-25, 2018).

GraalVM: "Run Programs Faster Anywhere"

In the 17 April 2018 post "Announcing GraalVM: Run Programs Faster Anywhere," Thomas Wuerthinger and the GraalVM Team "present the first production-ready release" of "a universal virtual machine designed for a polyglot world" called GraalVM 1.0. GraalVM Community Edition (CE) is open source and is hosted on GitHub. The main GraalVM page describes it as "a universal virtual machine for running applications written in JavaScript, Python 3, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, and LLVM-based languages such as C and C++."

JavaScript and the JVM-based languages are recommended for production use of GraalVM 1.0 with improved support advertised for other languages in the near future. The GraalVM Downloads page provides for downloads of either the Community Edition (from GitHub) or the Enterprise Edition (EE, from Oracle Technology Network).

Mission Control Project in OpenJDK

Marcus Hirt has proposed "the creation of the Mission Control Project" on the OpenJDK announce mailing list. This seems like a logical step in the effort discussed in Mark Reinhold's message "Accelerating the JDK release cadence" to "open-source the commercial features in order to make the OpenJDK builds more attractive to developers and to reduce the differences between those builds and the Oracle JDK" with the "ultimate goal" of making "OpenJDK and Oracle JDK builds completely interchangeable."

Flight Recorder in OpenJDK

Speaking of commercial features of the Oracle JDK being brought into the OpenJDK, JEP 328 ("Flight Recorder") had some interesting news this month with Markus Gronlund's hotspot-dev mailing list announcement of the availability of "a preview of a large part of the source code for JEP 328 : Flight Recorder."

JEP 321: HTTP Client (Standard) Targeted for JDK 11

As announced late last month, JEP 321 ["HTTP Client (Standard)"] has been targeted for JDK 11.

Significant Progress on Switch Expressions (and Improving Switch Statements)

There has been significant progress in the OpenJDK mailing lists' high-level design of switch expressions that includes enhancements to the existing switch statements since my original post on switch expressions. I have summarized some of the latest discussion (particularly that in a Brian Goetz post) in a recent blog post called "Enhancing Java switch Statement with Introduction of switch Expression."

Should I Return A Collection or Stream?

There's an interesting thread "Should I return a Collection or a Stream?" on the Java sub-reddit that is based on an interesting July 2017 discussion on StackOverflow related to whether it's most appropriate to return a Collection or a Stream in a particular case.