
IBM's Tim Ellison on the Future of Java
Tim Ellison talks to Charles Humble about Lambda, extension methods, modularity, and plans for Java beyond Java 8

Tim Ellison talks to Charles Humble about Lambda, extension methods, modularity, and plans for Java beyond Java 8
Oracle have today released NetBeans 7.1, with a strong emphasis on GUI enhancements. The product includes developer support for JavaFX 2.0, significant updates to the Swing Builder (Matisse), and tools for visual debugging of both JavaFX and Swing user interfaces. For web GUI, NetBeans continues to flesh out its already strong HTML 5 coverage, adding support for CSS3.
Just before Christmas, Oracle released a second update to Java SE 7, and a 30th for Java SE 6. As part of the Java 7 release, the Java Development Kit (JDK) now includes the SDK for developing JavaFX applications and, the JavaFX Runtime is now installed with the JRE.
On October 18th, Oracle released Java 7 Update 1, bringing Java 7 much needed stability and fixing a critical issue. InfoQ takes a look at what new performance improvements are included.

Microsoft's Neal Gafter, who was primary designer and implementer of the Java SE 4 and 5 language enhancements and now works for Microsoft on .NET platform languages, discusses the impact of Oracle's acquisition of Sun on Java,makes the case for adding segmented stacks and a meta-object protocol to Java,, and offers some insights into how Java and C#/.NET compare.

While it almost certainly remains the largest Ruby on Rails based site in the world, Twitter has gradually been moving more and more of its stack to the JVM. Last year the company announced that its back-end message queue had been re-written in Scala, and more recently it moved the search stack to Java, making Twitter search around three times faster.

Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. But do they actually work? In this two part article, Jeroen Borgers explores these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.
Simon Ritter discusses the future of Java, taking a look at proposed features and roadmap for Java 8 through 12.

Eoin Woods explains how Barclays Global Investors (BGI) designed Apex, a new porfolio management system, to meet the challenges it faces and why BGI chose to combine mainstream, boutique and open source Java technologies, including Oracle, WebLogic, Spring, Swing, JIDE, Flux, CPLEX, MVEL and XStream, to create an architecture with some interesting variations on the standard J2EE form.
Juergen Hoeller talks to Charles Humble about the upcoming features in Spring 3.1 and Spring 3.2. The interview also explores SpringSource's attitude to standardisation, and the impact of the Java 7 and 8 language changes, and the Jave EE 6, on the framework.

In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2007, Chet Haase discusses Java SE 6 Update N, the Java Kernel, Java FX, the shift in focus to consumer desktop features in Java 7, and redesigning of applets.