Sharat Chander, director of Java product management at Oracle opened the JavaOne 2016 keynotes on the theme of Java's prevalence in every sphere of our lives, personally and career wise, whether it be big data, IOT or even the cloud! He gave the audience a glimpse of Oracle Academy - an avenue where young Java developers feel empowered to gain knowledge, network with and join the Java community.
He discussed a complementary initiative at Oracle called go.java, which empowers and inspires the next generation to continue the learning journey. For Java developers, Oracle has launched a new developer portal called the Oracle Developer Gateway.
Next up was Michael Greene, vice president of the software and services group at Intel, whose keynote was centered around "enabling a smart and connected world with Java". Greene described a cycle of growth were smart devices drive data into the cloud, ultimately transforming businesses. He encouraged businesses to tap the end-to-end opportunity provided by Java, and described as an example how Intel is helping to make Java easy, efficient and expansive by collaborating on OpenJDK. He then gave the podium to Benjamin Wolff from Cern, who described Cern's massive control and monitoring devices, as well as their ERP, all running on the JDK.
Nandini Ramani, vice president of engineering at Twitter next joined Greene on stage. Ramani disclosed how Twitter had been unable to cope with the volume of traffic produced during the 2010 World Cup, and how they made an engineering decision to move away from the monolithic Ruby-on-Rails and migrate to a microservices architecture using Java and Scala on Linux, on OpenJDK. By the latest 2014 World Cup, Twitter was able to handle over 35 million tweets without breaking a sweat.
Raynold Xin, chief architect and co-founder of Databricks, next spoke about Apache Spark. Spark applications range from business intelligence to machine learning (artificial intelligence) and real-time data analytics. According to Xin, the JVM will first need to improve numerical computation by enhancing vectorization optimization, and project Panama will play a key role here. Secondly, the JVM will need to expose lower-level hardware features.
Next Georges Saab, vice president of development at Oracle, took stage and introduced Dr. Anita Sengupta, research professor at the University of Southern California. Dr. Sengupta gave the audience a deep dive into investigations on the planet Mars by various vehicles, the latest being the Curiousity rover. She highlighted similarities and differences between Mars and Earth, and talked about the engineering efforts involved in system development and testing. Dr. Sengupta then provided a visual demo of the actual landing process as well the post-landing analysis of the actual landing and calculation models. She discussed the various metrics gathering systems on Mars such as spectroscopy, weather sensors and life form sensors. Dr. Sengupta prognosticated on the future of explorative technological investigations leading to sending humans to Mars, and wondered if people would welcome such exploration and settlement on a new-world.
Saab next re-took the stage and walked the audience down memory lane, followed by a discussion of the growth of Java and its philosophies. (See the image below.)
Saab talked about meeting developers where they need to be productive and announced that the Oracle JDK will soon be distributed with Docker. This was followed by success stories by Masahiro Yoshioka, staff manager of the IT solution division at Mazda, and Clement Pang, co-founder and chief architect at Wavefront. Saab implored the audience to upgrade to Java 8, and that many explorers and developers have already downloaded Java SE 9. He then invited Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle to the stage.
Reinhold started with the much anticipated Java 9, and gave the audience a glimpse of all the JEPs that will comprise the product. He discussed the new JShell interactive console (covered in a recent news piece by InfoQ.) Reinhold then moved on to Project Jigsaw, that defines a standard modular system for the current monolithic platform. This modular system has the properties of scalability, approachability and compatiblility. The fundamentals of the proposed modular system design provides strong encapsulation and reliable configuration. He then provided the following examples with the use of JShell:
Reinhold then set aside the JShell console and provided the following graphical representation of the (72) Java standard modules.
He assured us that existing code will work without any issues. In general, if applications only use the Java SE libraries, they should have no problem with running on Java 9. But the internal APIs have been encapsulated for security and integrity and that could pose problems for code that may have been dependent on those internal APIs.
According to Reinhold, the JDK is built with JLink and he provided examples on how to use JLink to make smaller JDK:
Reinhold then welcomed Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle, who talked about Java 10 and beyond. Goetz discussed boiler plate code and how to eliminate it for simple domain classes. He also talked about expanding the scope of type inference to local variables. Reinhold queried Goetz on the bigger projects - project Valhalla and project Panama. InfoQ covered both in its JavaOne 2015 keynote coverage.
The keynote concluded with Anil Gaur, group vice president of cloud application foundation at Oracle. For more information on Gaur's keynote, please refer to InfoQ's coverage here.