back to article Out with the old and in with the new as Java 14 arrives, bringing with it first Project Panama enhancements

Oracle this week released JDK 14, its reference implementation of the Java 14 specification. Java, Big Red claims, continues to be the most preferred programming language among software developers. Java 14 shows up six months after Java 13, reflecting the accelerated release cadence adopted to move the code away from multi- …

  1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Not as much a bonanza as they may hope

    Oracle's licensing practies are forcing, or at least encouraging companies to switch to OpenJDK, which soon become the dominant framework, unless Oracle can demonstrate that it can provide significant added value.

    1. DrXym

      Re: Not as much a bonanza as they may hope

      I would say the Licence confusion is actively incentivizing people to look at other languages altogether. Those that stay will favour the OpenJDK simply to avoid having anything to do with Oracle.

      1. Danny 14

        Re: Not as much a bonanza as they may hope

        This. We had 2 apps that used java, neither do now. We have a couple of machines with openjava for supporting one last legacy switch in a hard to reach place, that one (covid depending) is pegged to go in August.

    2. Jaap Aap

      Re: Not as much a bonanza as they may hope

      Hasn't OpenJDK been the reference implementation since a long time? Has something changed?

  2. hittitezombie

    OpenJDK or bust.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @hittitezombie - Just wait untill Oracle is done with Google

      If they win, OpenJDK will receive a visit from a team of well trained Oracle lawyers and they will be forced to close shop. I guess a safe bet is abandoning Java altogether.

  3. Daniel von Asmuth
    Facepalm

    Featuritis

    "Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports"

    Does that sound like Oracle Solaris developers will love?

  4. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

    Take that!

    362: Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports

    Ha, those folks at Oracle are really screwing over the ... other people at Oracle.

    1. Morten Bjoernsvik

      Re: Take that!

      >362: Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports

      >>Ha, those folks at Oracle are really screwing over the ... other people at Oracle.

      There is no one left to screw. Those folks are long gone.

  5. Steve Channell
    Flame

    Project Panama

    Two of the weaknesses of the Java platform are [1] the poor support provided through JNI to integrate Java applications with native binary libaries [2] Java practictioner view that all applications should be recoded in Java to avoid interoperability problems. While it is generally accepted that the Microsoft extension to Java for COM integration was an attempt to make Java applications Windows specific; it is also true that copyright of COM was transfered to X/Open to remove licence issues. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the use if COM (on windows) and XPCOM (on Linux/ *ix) was a genuine attempt to provide an object based application binary interface.

    Over the twenty years since Sun committed to integrating XP/COM ABI into the JVM, we have not seen the wholesale re-implemntation of everything in Java, but we have seen many inovations with FPGA, GPGPU, SDN, ML, AI etc that demostrate that there will always be a need for interop with Binary code.

    Project Panama took like it has incorporated the lessons (failings) of Object-RPC, but the absents of "struct" (value-types) is still an ommision that makes this task more difficult. Comparing Project Panama with the CLR P/Invoke leaves me wondering whether this decades old problem will ever be solved..

    It's ironic that one of the big impacts of Java has been the regression to TCP/IP Sockets for interop, and IDL (e.g. protobuf/gRPC) for message formatting.

  6. werdsmith Silver badge

    Oracle Java still hanging around like a bad smell.

  7. Blank Reg

    The new Records will be as close to structs as you're likely to get in Java. But it's still in preview on JDK 14

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    At least adobe flash is end of life. Can't the java misery just stop?

  9. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Two bad ideas

    "the accelerated release cadence adopted to move the code away from multi-year development cycles and to match the pace of other modern software projects."

    "There are also a number of features that have been removed because they're no longer supported or obsolete"

    What developers really need for anything other than ephemeral web toys is stable familiar dev environments to ensure quality code production and long term systems maintenance. We support some users who are tied to WIN XP, so we have to develop code to run on Java 8.

    There's a strong indication that "keeping up" with other vendors is now much more important than serving the user base. The inevitable consequence will be poorer product quality - less durability, less reliability and negligible support. As for "obsolete" features, why not just leave them in? What harm do they do? PHP is notorious for this - we've had to rewrite PHP modules in online systems that broke when the service provider "updated" PHP, just to keep systems running that were too expensive to recreate from scratch.

    I'm all for progress, but even more for backward compatibility.

    1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

      Re: Two bad ideas

      We sell a Java API and have been since Java 1.2. With the exception of applets and Java Web Start, there's really been very little of consequence removed.

      I tested last night on Java 8, 11 and 14 across OpenJDK and Oracle and the differences were only what we'd expect - updates (in our case, to the level of Unicode support, and to antialiasing when rendering, due to changes under the hood in the AWT between 8 and 11). Nashorn Javascript is still available in 14, despite warnings it might be removed.

      That said, I completely agree on stability being the overriding factor. The 6 month cycle is beyond ridiculous and it's only effect is to make sure no-one bothered with Java 9, 10, 12 and 13.

    2. Smartypantz

      Re: Two bad ideas

      Hear-Hear

      Let's hope that the users never wake up up and realizes that the whole, insane mess of "accelerated development cycles" is just i big scam to employ an army of developers scratching an itch!

      New version every few months with major feature changes is great job security for an developer, and its a steady income for the software companies. For the users, (strangely) tolerating it, it is an enemy of productivity.

      Let's hope they never wake up!!

  10. Hooda Thunkett

    "Project Panama is an OpenJDK project to make the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) accessible via non-Java APIs, so developers can make native C/C++ calls, for example, from the JVM..."

    So, breaking the old "write once, run everywhere" further then?

    1. Mike 137 Silver badge

      " so developers can make native C/C++ calls, for example, from the JVM"

      This is actually essential in some cases - e.g. serial comms (remember RS_232? Still widely used in industrial plant). It's also common practice. "Run everywhere" is supported by including a set of alternative OS specific routines and calling the relevant one for the OS from Java.

  11. Morten Bjoernsvik

    Great IntelliJ salespitch

    I looked at the blog post but did not understand a thing until I ran the gifs. If you are a java developer you'll be lost without the help from intelliJs intellisense. I see the same when I drabble in java using the VSC redhat java plugin and ask my coworkers for help, they often says I just do this in IntelliJ. But this says a lot about the language, way to much sugarcoating, I still finish code faster with python in VSC than java in intelliJ.

    1. Smartypantz

      Re: Great IntelliJ salespitch

      If you don't know what you are doing and won't or can't learn. You will fuck things up! sad ,but a fact of life

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