Java Archive

The WebP image format based on VP8 and released by Google recently now has a native Java decoder. The new decoder can be run in any browser with Java enabled and could help provide a solution for user otherwise unable to view WebP content. A demo applet of the decoder in action is also available.

"Charging that Oracle has willfully disregarded the licensing terms for its own Java technology, the Apache Software Foundation has called upon other members of the Java Community Process (JCP) to vote against the next proposed version of the language, should Oracle continue to impose restrictions on open-source Java use. The nonprofit organization has also indicated that it could end its involvement in the JCP if the licensing restrictions stay in place."

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees recent experiments enabling a resurgence for JavaScript on the server, one likely to dent Java's role in the data center. 'Today, projects such as CommonJS and Node.js are extending JavaScript even further, allowing it to take on Java's traditional role in the data center. In a fascinating role reversal, JavaScript is becoming the versatile, powerful, all-purpose language for the Web, while Java risks becoming a kind of modern-day Cobol," McAllister writes. And though such experiments have a ways to go, the benefits of JavaScript as a server-side language are clear and striking.

InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock takes an in-depth look at scripting language performance on the JVM. While Java has become more complex, the JVM has become one of the fastest and most efficient execution platforms available, creating an opening for a new generation of languages that lack Java's syntax overload to take advantage of the JVM. The report examines Groovy, JRuby, Scala, Fanthom, and Jython. Of the five, Groovy and JRuby have risen from the niche, a trend that will also likely benefit Scala and Fanthom as well. Jython's moment in the sun, Binstock writes, has probably come and gone.

Any doubts regarding Oracle's stewardship of Java were dispelled yesterday, as Ellison and company have made it clear that they are very interested in making Java an even stronger alternative to .Net, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. "We have the money to invest in Java, because Java is a very profitable business for us already," said Ellison, whose plan for integrating Sun technology is ambitious, serving an even more ambitious goal: to create a soup-to-nuts tech juggernaut akin to IBM in the 1960s. Java will remain a key component of this push, with a new Java runtime, greater modularity, better support for non-Java languages, improved performance, and multicore-optimized garbage collection in the works, McAllister writes. Also revealed are plans to unify the Java SE and Java ME programming models and APIs and to enable JVM to run natively on hypervisors, allowing developers to run multiple Java instances on a single virtualized server.

Real-time Java combines ease of programming in the Java language with the performance required by applications that must conform to real-time constraints. Extensions to the Java language provide features for real-time environments that are lacking in the traditional Java runtime environment. This article, the first in a three-part series, describes some of these features and explains how you can apply them to enable real-time performance in your own applications.