What Are Your Priorities for Java and the JVM?

by Charles-Humble on Aug 07, 2012 |

With Oracle investing heavily in Java, and a roadmap for Java 9, 10 and beyond under discussion, we thought it would be interesting to get your views on what the priorities should be for Java the language and the JVM as a platform. InfoQ is experimenting with a new tool for surveying the views and opinions of our readers on important topics.  

There are 17 items on the list, and for more background on many of these ideas see:

 

 

 

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Link to Tim Ellison's interview is broken by Neil Bartlett

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I would have loved to vote ... by Steve McJones

... but I don't see the necessity why I should be forced to hand over my tweets/contacts/etc., considering that I'm already logged in to my InfoQ user account.

Re: I would have loved to vote ... by Dio Synodinos

Hi Steve,

The voting widget has been developed as a completely separate service, eg similar to Disqus, so that in the future we'll be able to embed it in any page we like without having any dependencies with the InfoQ CMS. For example you will be able to embed it directly in your own blog.

We're also trying to see what would be the best way to handle authentication, for users that already have an InfoQ account.

For the record, if for example you chose to vote with your FB account, the service would only be getting your name and email address, and not information like contacts, nor would it require privileges for posting stuff on your timeline.

Thanks for taking the time to send us feedback!

Re: Link to Tim Ellison's interview is broken by Dio Synodinos

Thanks Neil, you saved the day :)

Asking for way too many privileges here by Patrick Julien

Why does the survey want us to login using another authority? And why does it want to manage my contacts on Google? Or see who is following me on twitter?

Re: Asking for way too many privileges here by Dio Synodinos

Hi Patrick,

I'm replying inline:

Why does the survey want us to login using another authority?

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, the voting widget has been developed as a completely separate service (different domain), eg similar to Disqus, so that in the future we'll be able to embed it in any page we like without having any dependencies with the InfoQ CMS. For example you will be able to embed it directly in your own site, blog, etc.

And why does it want to manage my contacts on Google? Or see who is following me on twitter?

Very good observation about Google! I've just shipped an update that requires only the absolute minimum permissions for Google. As far as I understand, the current Twitter permissions are already the bare minimum.

Thanks Patrick for taking the time to send this feedback. It's very valuable for us in order to improve this service :)

All for JVM, nothing for Java is what I want by Serge Bureau

Scala is the way to go, or at least some modern JVM language: Java is only for legacy.

Improve the JVM and only patch Java, no more wasted effort should be expanded on it

Won't vote with this authentication scheme ... / question unclear by Dirk Detering

The non-infoq authorisation is annoying, so -as much as I want- I won't vote. :-(
Nasty, that I therefore cannot see the analysis nevertheless >:-(

Beside: The "mobile support" question is not intuitive. What exactly will I tell you if I vote that item?
Will I vote for another mobile effort, or will I vote for staying with ME?

mobile support? by arnaud m

"Mobile support" is very low in the results...
Example: JS, Obj-C/C++, C#,... but no JVM on iOS!
Server-side UI frameworks are going to die.
I don't understand why client-side development is so ignored.
I wonder how any of those new super-cool JVM languages could be useful without a JVM to run it on major mobile and desktop OSes.

As for Segmented stacks (and coroutines), it seems they are a good way to write very simple asynchronous code,
instead of the complexity of Promises, callbacks spagetti, etc.
Probably any JVM language could implement it at the compiler level like C# does (async) but it seems inefficient (like emulating closures with inner classes).

Re: Won't vote with this authentication scheme ... / question unclear by Charles Humble

Hi Dirk,


"Will I vote for another mobile effort, or will I vote for staying with ME?"


For the purposes of this survey I wasn't really looking to drill into the specifics of whether any mobile effort should look at creating a successor to Java ME or continue under the ME brand, but whether InfoQ readers felt it was worthwhile Oracle investing in the mobile/embedded space at all or whether they should leave it to Apple and Google, and instead focus on the core Java SE/EE technologies and underlying platform.

What about hot deployment? by AdiSesha Reddy

I do not care about half of the options listed above. Give features of JRebel and DCEVM in language toolkit, even it takes one release dedicated to it.

Too low level! by Simon Dallaway

I'd comment that very little has changed in the fundamentals of programming in the 30 odd years I've been in the industry. Yes, we're tackling bigger problems and yes the UI is far prettier than it was then but the underlying approach hasn't changed much. What I'd like to see time spent on is higher level environments that allow solutions to be deployed rapidly without coding effort and with appropriate levels of documentation.

Re: Too low level! by James Lei

Agreed. Java 8 Lambda syntax look more complex than Scala, I doubt most Java developers willing to accept Functional paradigm since it offer little motivation to leverage legacy OO code, not sure how will functional and OO affect the productivity for the better or worse?

If Scala already have the features (from the votes) why on earth do we need Lambda in Java? Why not making the opportunity to improve Scala instead instead of taking more years to release? It doesn't make sense to reinvent Java syntax whereas C# is for OO and F# is for Functional.

Biased results by Pavel Moravec

IMO, it is not just a coincidence that number of points is decreasing with position of the option in the list (in time when I voted). I can see four possible reasons for that:

1) An author of the list has exactly! the same priorities as average voter has ;)
2) The results are strongly influenced by ordering of the options (voters simply go from the beginning and have less and less points to use and don't remove earlier placed points frequently).
3) The ordering is changing in time, by using already collected results.
4) Something else I can't see.

I can't imagine 1). 2) would mean wasting of time of 700+ voters and 3) would be a joke :) so I hope 4) is right.

JVM by Steven Shaw

JVM:
LCO
The regular set of unsigned "machine types"
Value classes including arbitrary precision integer (that starts as a "small-integer" tagged into an oop) and C-like packed structures with alignment that can overlay byte arrays.
Introduce/deprecate covariant arrays

Java:
Closures
Type inference
Higher kinds
Variance annotations
Remove null references
Adopt Scala?

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