Tag: java

This article was mentioned on this week’s JavaPosse podcast, and is an interesting ‘top 12’ of the most influential software systems ever written, according to their historical impact and longevity.

Interesting to note, the author ranks Java in the top 5, for it’s use of the Virtual Machine giving platform independence, the concepts of the Applet sandbox, and the fact that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – Microsoft borrowed the concepts of the Java Platform by implementing their own virtual machine as an integral part of the .NET platform (the Common Language Runtime), and then developed their own Java-like language, C#. Interestingly enough though, Microsoft seems to have missed the whole point about platform independence by only developing .NET for the Windows platform, but then when you control the desktop world with Windows why would you want to support any other platform?

Check out the rest of the list for some interesting computing history.

Glassfish V2 Milestone 1 is now available. The V2 release of Glassfish is adding enterprise scalability features such as clustering, and also new WebServices support.

More info here, and a list of the milestones and features here.

Since Sun’s announcement this week of their concrete plans to Open Source the javac compiler and the HotSpot VM, I expect there has been some panic in some circles discussing what this means for current and future Java developers and projects.

As summarized in this news item on news.com, the impact is likely to be neglible to end-user developers, and current and/or future projects using Java. The main difference will be that you have the option to commit features and/or bug fixes back to the source. In reality, a much higher percentage of users of open-sourced software just use the software as it is – only a small number ever get involved in the ‘nuts ‘n bolts’ and become code submitters.

This should be seen as a good thing for Java as it will increase choice (who’s VM implemenation do I want to use?), and through competition keep people from becoming halfhearted about their VM implementation. Even up until now there have been commercial VM implementations from different vendors (BEA’s JRockit, IBMs VM), as well as ‘based-on’ Java implementations, which for legal reasons are not allowed to call themselves ‘Java’, but are definitely based on the language (eg Waba VM for handheld devices) and even based on the Java platform such as Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), which is arguably the same concept as the Java VM, together with the C# language and a number of other languages which can be compiled to run on the same CLR.

Sun will be dropping the project names they use for upcoming JDK releases to get ready for the open sourcing of parts of the Java platform. I guess this is to reduce confusion about what project name is what release.

So from this point onwards, the release formally known as Mustang will be called just JDK 6, and Dolphin will be just JDK 7. Both projects are already on java.net – JDK 6 is here, and JDK 7 is here.

For a small piece of Java history, check out this site which lists all the project code names for all the previous Java releases.