The JVM finally moving forward

After almost a year of delay, Java 7 has been officially released for the Mac. SeeJava 7 Mac OS X download and README.

In order to use it in Eclipse and others, bear in mind that the PATH is now:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents

This may be inaccesible to Eclipse, but you can paste the whole line, or create a symlink. It contains the sources, but no Javadocs.

This is a huge milestone, which marks the beginning of the end for Java 6, which was released 6 years ago. Technologies like Scala have soared since. But now with JDK 7 been readily available in all platforms, and with many bugfixes since the original release, it's time to upgrade. Last step will be JDK7u6 when the JRE will be fully availabe. See my previous post on Java 7, 8 and beyond

Update: After running a couple of scripts, I ran into this issue with UnknownHostException in JDK7

See this snippet:

This is my /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
192.168.1.3 loki

Java 7, 8 and Beyond

Java 7 update 4 developer preview is available to download from OpenJDK website. Why is this any important? because is the first candidate release of the official JDK released by Oracle since Apple decided to stop shipping a custom build.

This also paves the way for further releases of Java 7 and ultimately Java 8 given the imminent end of life of Java 6.

Are you using Java 7 already? I can see it been similar to Java 5. Few people actually using it, and instead moving directly to Java 8, or feel pushed by it, to move into the last known stable version (in this case, 7).

Java 8 will bring lots of new features making the language a lot closer to what Scala delivers today, and is been heavily influenced by its success. See Simon Ritter's presentation and Fredrik Ohrstrom for more details. Better still... get yourself a build !

See Early Draft of Project Lambda by Brian Goetz. More info on Project Lambda for Java 8

More updates on Lambda, this time is on collections: Brian Goetz update on Streams for Java 8. I particularly like to stress this point on his blog post:

we will pursue an evolutionary strategy of adding extension methods to existing interfaces (such as Collection, List, or Iterable), or perhaps to new interfaces (such as 'Stream') that are retrofitted onto existing classes, enabling many of the desired idioms without making people trade in their trusty ArrayLists and HashMaps. (This is not to say that Java will never have a new Collections framework; clearly there are limitations with the existing Collections framework beyond simply not being designed for lambdas. Creating a new-and-improved collections framework is a fine candidate for consideration in a future version of the JDK.)

Even with Java8, Scala will continue to be ahead of Java, offering a more powerful and complete solution. The large change that was moving from Scala 2.7 to 2.8 in terms of upgrading collections, will have to wait at least until Java 9 to take effect. Because of this, Scala is a technology to stay, and lead the way to a functional revolution.

Good Days to be Scala developer

Next week is Scala Days London 2012, a 2 days marathon with some elite hackers. It's the first time I'm attending and really looking forward to it. The topics on discussion are extremely exciting. Distributed and cloud computing,  functional theory, Akka, Play Framework, Spark, Finagle, and obviously, cool production scenarios and war stories.

Typesafe Stack 2.0 brought so many cool things that takes a lot of time just to catchup, so really interested to attend talks around Akka 2.0 and Play 2.0.

The emphasis that Typesafe and the community are putting on tool support is paying dividends.

SBT has finally become a stable build environment and the community is thriving with an ever growing list of plugins. Intellij IDEA support is great and keeps expanding.

Today Scala 2.9.2 was released together with Scala IDE 2.1 M1, which pack lots of nice features like move refactoring, implicates highlighting, scala debugger and more!. And the roadmap to the final release looks great. This shows how Scala itself has matured, and how the whole ecosystem is taking life on its own.

That provides a lot of confidence not just to developers, but to small and large companies, that are increasingly considering Scala, as evidenced by the growing number of quality scala jobs available.

Exciting Scala Days !!