Want to know what’s happening in the world of Java this week? Wondering what are the top stories about Java this week?
These stories are written by AssignmentOverflow.com’s senior content writer.
Java is undoubtedly one of the most widely used languages in the world, especially after the advent of Android mobile apps that, as of now, are primarily built using Java.
In fact, according to a 2020 study, Java is the third most popular programming language in the world, just behind Java script and Python. Consequently, new developments are constantly taking place in the world of Java.
New programming paradigms are being formed. Old ways of programming are being discarded. New features are constantly being added. Hundreds of thousands of programmers all over the world are incessantly creating new libraries that Java programmers can use. What we mean to say is, if you want to know the top stories of the week about the Java programming language, you get plenty to read.
Here are some top stories.
The Java programming training market report
The Covid-19 outbreak has brought the entire world to its knees. Industries are being closed. People are losing their jobs. The GDP of the most advanced countries has stumbled. People have been confined to their homes for months now. But there has been one industry that has been booming: online education and training.
Websites and apps like Codecademy, Learning Tree and Udacity are providing online programming courses. Since many IT professionals are confined to their homes or working from home, they have lots of time at their hands and they want to better utilize it. Hence, they are learning new programming languages or honing existing languages.
The “Global Java Programming Training Market” report has been released in collaboration with the coding training companies mentioned above. The report includes the overview that throws some light on the value chain structure, industrial environment, regional analysis, applications being developed, market size and various forecasts about Java.
The market report on the Java programming language also covers the current Covid-19 impact on the market. It talks about the rapidly changing market scenario in the current and future assessment of how outbreak is going to affect the Java programming market.
The report has the following categories: types, applications, regions and the forecasting period of 2020–2026. It also offers information to those who are seeking investment opportunities in the Java programming market along with threat analysis.
You can download the Java programming market report (sample) from here.
The regions covered in the report include the USA, Canada, Mexico, France, the UK, Germany, India, Japan, China, the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America including Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the UAE and the rest of the Middle East & Africa.
Some pertinent questions answered in the report include
- What are the factors driving the growth of the Java programming market?
- What are the roadblocks on the way of the Java programming market growth?
- What are the future opportunities?
- Which of the most dynamic companies within the Java programming training market?
- What key developments are expected in the coming years?
- What are the top trends?
Oracle has released Helidon 2.0 for Java microservices
Another top news of the week about Java is that Oracle has just unveiled Helidon 2.0 for Java microservices.
There might be 2 things you want to know: What are microservices and what is Helidon?
In one of our previous updates you read about DevOps which is a programming culture that encourages you to build a collection of small applications that are eventually weaved together to build the main, bigger application.
Microservices work with the same philosophy. It is a form of a service-oriented architecture style in which applications are built as a collection of different smaller services rather than a single app. This is one of the most important skills for Java developers to have. Microservices make it very easy to maintain large applications. They are even independently deployable — you can use them as smaller, standalone applications.
Helidon is a framework for building microservices. It was used internally in Oracle products. Now it has been declared open source by Oracle. It was originally called J4C (Java for Cloud). Version 2.0 was released in June 24 and the new project features Helidon SE (the other one is Helidon MP), which is a set of reactive, non-blocking libraries for functional programming.
Helidon 2.0 is available on GitHub. The framework can be used for building new microservices as well as extending the capabilities of your existing applications.
A new version of the OpenJDK Developers’ Guide is available to download now
You can download it from here.
This is a nice replacement of the existing guides that are no longer maintained. This is a less extensive version. It especially helps the new community members to contribute to the development of OpenJDK.
Wondering what is OpenJDK?
OpenJDK stands for Open Java Development Kit. It is a free and open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition from Sun Microsystems. As you may already know through our various updates, Java was first developed by programmers working at Sun Microsystems. In 2006, the source code of Java was released under the GPL. This included the Java Virtual machine and the Java compiler.
OpenJDK combines the Java Runtime Addition and the Java Development Kit. If you have been doing some serious programming in Java whether it is for web applications or mobile apps, there is little chance that you haven’t worked in OpenJDK.
Red Hat Mandrel is making Java native
One of the biggest advantages of building applications in Java is that the Java programming language is machine independent. This means, once you have built an application in Java, as long as there is Java runtime environment available, the Java application is going to run.
This also becomes a weakness for Java-powered mobile apps and software applications because then, the Java programs are unable to use the native powers of individual machines.
Red Hat aims to solve this problem through the release of a new job distribution called Mandrel. It compiles Java application directly to native machine code for faster start-up and lower memory consumption. Fundamentally it is based on Oracle’s GraalVM. The Oracle framework boasts of 50 times faster start-up time and 5 times smaller memory usage. This is certainly going to give another push to Java towards becoming the most sought-after language for building as well as mobile apps.
What is new in JDK 15?
Java 15 has been released. It is the next version of Java Standard Edition from Oracle. Java 15 includes text blocks, a foreign-memory access API, hidden classes and previews of sealed classes and records.
What does foreign-memory access API mean? All memory heaps that don’t exist within Java are called for in-memory heaps such as native, persistent and managed heaps. Although garbage collection has been a big feature of Java since the beginning, in JDK 15, it has been considerably improved along with sharing of memory across processes and serialize and deserialize memory content by mapping files onto memory.
What does review of sealed classes mean? It is often difficult to use sealed classes because they restrict access to their provisions to other classes and interfaces. With the preview being possible, the programmers can view what capabilities these sealed classes have and then make their code access those individual capabilities.
Some features that were deprecated in JDK 14 have been reintroduced in Java 15 with their improved versions.
Java has beaten Python for being the most popular programming language
While JavaScript remains the most used scripting language on the web, both for web apps and mobile apps, Java has just left Python behind in popularity. Although Python adoption continues to grow, among mobile app developers, Java remains the most popular. The recent survey was conducted by JetBrains and it was discovered that Java retains its top spot among developers.
The IDE maker surveyed almost 20,000 developers for its State of Developer Ecosystem 2020 Report to identify the latest trends when it comes to programming languages, tools and technologies.
Whereas Java remains the most popular programming language, the report found out that it is JavaScript that is the most used programming language for web apps and mobile apps. 39% respondents said that they use JavaScript, followed by 37% for Java and 31% for Python.
New release of Minecraft: Java Edition
The makers of Minecraft have released 1.16.1 new Minecraft: Java Edition.
These are the week’s top stories about Java. As mentioned above, despite the fact that Java is one of the oldest programming languages, almost being a contemporary of C and C++, it has not lost its sheen because it is platform independent and most of the mobile app developers prefer to program in Java.