In this interview, Google’s Josh Bloch shares his views on the open-source Java landscape as well as on the future of the Java language, including changes being implemented via Project Coin. Bloch also discusses support for multi-core in programming languages, support for multiple languages on the JVM, Java pain points and the “next big language.”
At QCon 2008, Neal Gafter discusses how to evolve a widely deployed language without causing disruption using planned changes for JDK7 (superpackages, closures, annotations on types, type inference, exception handling, and self types) as an example. He examines how the changes are conditioned by preexisting language design choices, and discusses their influence on API design.
Oracle has announced that the JavaSE 7 governing JSR (336) has passed the public review ballot. Google voted against the vote, Werner Keil abstained, and no vote was received from Credit Suisse. Many others adding their concerns regarding the ongoing licensing dispute between Sun/Oracle and Apache.
Oracle recently released Java 6 update 21 which had a small but innocuous change in the way that the java.dll was created. Unfortunately, this change impacted Eclipse's startup; but a fix is on the way.
Mark Reinhold, Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems, has been advocating about how “cool” would be for the Sun JDK to be modular. He’s is putting up a good argument about how the complexity is hurting the platform and how the Java Kernel and Quickstarter features in the JDK 6u10 release just address the symptoms of JDK’s long-term interconnected growth.
