In a new article by yours truly, now up on otn/java, titled “Java Experts on the State of Java,” four Java experts, Adam Bien, Charles Nutter, Kirk Pepperdine and Simon Ritter, share their unique perspectives on what’s happening in the world of Java.
Consultant Adam Bien, winner of many awards and an expert in Java EE, remarks that, “Only a few years ago, Java EE was used mostly by larger companies—now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows.” He is also excited about Project Nashorn, which is coming in Java SE 8.
Charles Nutter, co-creator of JRuby and a Java Champion, observes that “JRuby seems to have hit a tipping point this past year, moving from ‘just another Ruby implementation’ to ‘the best Ruby implementation for X,’ where X may be performance, scaling, big data, stability, reliability, security, or one of several other features important for today’s applications.”
Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine, an expert in Java performance tuning, comments that, “The volume of data we’re dealing with just seems to be getting bigger and bigger all the time. A couple of years ago, you’d never think of needing a heap that was 64 GB, but today there are deployments in which the heap has grown to 256 GB, and there are plans for heaps that are even larger. Dealing with all that data simply requires more horsepower and some very specialized techniques. In some cases, teams are simply trying to push hardware to the breaking point. Under those conditions, you need to be very clever just to get things to work—let alone to get them to be fast. We are very quickly moving from a world where everything happens in a transaction to one in which you’ve lost if you even consider using a transaction.”
Finally, Oracle’s Java Rock Star Simon Ritter celebrates the Raspberry Pi: “I don’t think there is one definitive thing that makes the Raspberry Pi significant, but a combination of things really makes it stand out. First, it’s the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply; an SD card for storage; and maybe a screen, keyboard, and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, because it avoids problems such as cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick.”
Check out the article here.