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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Devoxx 2008 - Day 4 / Java 7 and JavaPosse

So again there were two big keynotes today - the first from Josh Bloch about "Effective Java 2nd Edition" an update to his famous book "Effective Java" considering things like Enum and Generics. Well you may say this is not a keynote - and you are correct - it was a "Josh Talk". But nevertheless it was fun.

Next was Mark Reinhold giving an update about Java 7 - with a focus on Project Jigsaw. This is the codename for a modularized Java - not only with respect to the libraries, but also down to the VM level. It seems to be a large, complex and very ambitious thing but I think it is the way to go. BTW none of the existing module frameworks won, there will be one especially tuned for this problem field. Pictures taken from slides shown are here. You are thinking this will take a long time? Well, Mark said the delivery of Java 7 will be in early 2010, that is quite soon (measured in Java dimensions).

The first technical session was Brain Goetz and Alex Buckley talking about the way towards a dynamic VM, so that other languages can make themselves more at home on top of the JVM. It seems the changes to be done are not so big, they invented some real clever concepts for letting the language decide about method resolution - and it will be part of Java 7. So that will give a major boost for your favourite language besides Java - Scala, Jython, JRuby... Next was a seesion about the new NIO API's in Java 7. They should really simplify the way to use NIO and reduce the need to write your own layer on top of NIO.

Now for the fun part - JavaPosse Live Recording. The Posse guys were as much fun as always discussing JavaFX, Java 7 and all the other things around Devoxx. Tor and Joe were live via video - just listen to the podcast to imagine the fun we had.

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