Java Archive

Java 21 introduces the notion of sequenced collections, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) has been extended to maintain separate generations for young and old objects for improving Java app performance, virtual threads are now out of preview form, and the Windows 32-bit x86 port has been deprecated for removal. Java 21 also brings some new preview features including string templates, the latest iteration on the foreign function and memory API, unnamed classes and instance main methods, scoped values, and structured concurrency. You can find the GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds at the OpenJDK website, and the closed source builds from Oracle are also available.

What follows is a list of the 25 most ingenious and influential Java apps ever written, from Wikipedia Search to the US National Security Agency’s Ghidra. The scope of these applications runs the gamut: space exploration, video games, machine learning, genomics, automotive, cybersecurity, and more. It’s posted by Oracle and thus it makes me feel dirty to link to it, but I guess it’s still an interesting list – albeit with one obvious, huge, giant, inescapable elephant of an mission.

Almost 14 years ago, way back in 2003, Sun Microsystems unveiled Project Looking Glass, a 3D desktop environment written in Java and making extensive use of Java 3D. The demo, by Jonathan Schwartz, always stuck with me over the years, and since YouTube recommended the demo to me today, I figured it'd be interesting to you remind you all of simpler times, when flipping windows around and 3D rendering in Java actually managed to get us excited (something no other project would ever manage to... Wait.).

Project Looking Glass was developed for about three years, and it actually saw a 1.0 release in late 2006. It's one of those random projects exploring what we then thought could be the future of computing, right before the iPhone came onto the scene and changed everything. While nothing came out of Project Looking Glass, Schwartz' demo did teach me the phrase "arbitrarily clever", which I'm unusually attached to.

"Java is a programming language that allows developers to write once and deploy everywhere - from high-end gaming desktops to smartphones. Its OS-agnostic and widespread nature is one of its strongest selling points, but one area where it can fall flat is performance. Generally, Java applications are not going to perform as well as native applications written for a specific OS. However, thanks to Project Sumatra that performance gap may soon become less of an issue."

Oracle's Sun Java JDK packages are to be removed from the Ubuntu partner repositories and disabled on users systems. Oracle, in retiring the "Operating System Distributor License for Java," means Canonical no longer have permission to distribute the package. The change will affect Ubuntu 10.04 LTs, Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 users only. Users who have the "sun-java-6" package installed on their system will see it removed via a future software update -- the exact date of which is "TBD."

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an in-depth comparison of four Java cloud platforms, putting CloudBees, Google App Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Cloud Foundry through their paces to 'reveal the pleasures and perils of coding on a public cloud platform.' 'The danger of lock-in seems to lurk around every corner, and that's not necessarily the worst part. What if we're happy with everything about our cloud except we need one missing feature that the cloud's masters either can't or don't want to deliver?' Wayner writes. 'Some of the clouds rely upon standard tools that take standard WAR files and deliver their information to the world. Others have so many proprietary twists that you might as well tattoo the code on your arm -- it's going to be with you for the rest of your life.'