By Alexandra Weber Morales
At 21 years old, Java is the most popular programming language on Earth. This year’s JavaOne keynote highlighted the way scientists are using “write once, run anywhere” Java code today. Multiple speakers gave hints for how the open source language and its enterprise platform, Java Enterprise Edition, will evolve for more connected—possibly Mars-based—highly scalable applications, with applications from the farthest reaches of the universe to the smallest.
“With its nearly 17 miles of circumference, CERN’s large hadron collider is the largest machine ever built. It's kind of ironic to research the smallest building blocks of the universe, you need to use the largest scientific devices,” Benjamin Wolff, staff software engineer for CERN, told the audience during the JavaOne keynote.
Speaking at JavaOne, Michael Greene, Intel’s vice president and general manager of system technologies and optimization, said JDK 9 has doubled performance by enabling new 512-bit AVX extensions.
“Java is used in many different areas at CERN. The strategic decision to build on the Java platform, in many cases, already dates back to the mid-90s, after the first release of the JDK.” According to Wolff, the Java-based Accelerator Control System orchestrates more than 100,000 devices with more than two million I/O endpoints. “We're speaking about a massive system involving more than 10 million lines of code, split over 1,500 Java artifacts, used by more than 300 UI applications,” he explained.
Oracle, the company behind Java, is extending Java 9—the next release of the language and its runtime—to make it the ideal platform for developing microservices, building projects for containers, and using reactive programming.
- Related: Create the Future with Java
Meanwhile, there's an enormous need for enterprises to go digital. Keynote speaker Anil Gaur, Oracle’s group vice president of engineering, promised Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) developers new tools for building large, event-based, distributed systems.
A common theme in the keynote was the promised modularization feature, Project Jigsaw—which enables Java programs to ship and run with much smaller footprints, thereby using fewer system resources. The challenge of Jigsaw is structural, Mark Reinhold, chief architect for Oracle’s Java Platform Group, told the audience: “It has to be approachable, something that everybody can use to write large applications and large systems. We need it be scalable. It can't just be a toy, it has to be something that's capable of modularizing the platform itself. And finally, it has to be compatible. We can't modularize the system and say, 'Well, all that old code, all those systems you have running now, you have to go do a bunch of work just to make them work.' No, if something works today, it should work tomorrow.”
Ultimately, these requirements make this “a fundamental new kind of program component wired deeply into the Java Virtual Machine and understood in the programming language. It's not a library or framework that's just kind of built on top of Java,” Reinhold said.
The result will be a powerful replacement, however, for the complexities of the classpath mechanism, and will enable strong encapsulation. The changes will help developers rearchitect their systems to handle the “connection effect,” or the impending onslaught of data from the Internet of Things.
Other keynote demos and announcements included:
- JShell, the Java Read-Eval-Print Loop;
- Eliminating boilerplate code by expanding the scope of type inference;
- Java support for the Intel Joule development board in the Intel IoT development kit, scheduled to be released by the end of year;
- The release of 20 sample Internet of Things solutions written in Java to be used with the Intel IoT developers kit;
- An Intel portal designed to track raw workload results for a number of programming language runtimes, including OpenJDK; and
- JDK 9 optimizations such as a compression codec.
Michael Greene, Intel’s vice president and general manager of system technologies and optimization in the software and services group, said JDK 9 has “doubled the performance by enabling our new 512-bit AVX extensions in OpenJDK. There are fast and performant implementations of many more encryption standards, making it easier for developers to deploy secure options. And we've made math operations even smarter by squeezing three to four times more performance out of key operations. This is a big deal for the finance, science, and medical guys out there. The code is all there, so go use it.”
Alexandra Weber Morales, principal with World Wind Writing, is the former editor in chief of a Latin American medical technology publication and, later, Software Development magazine.
