Meanwhile, still using Java 8 at work
Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
61–70 of 304 posts
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#62This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.
IMHO, Marketing.
Java had so many marketing crazes that it's crazy. I still remember the "Java mobile game" fad from a dozen of years ago - Java this, Java that, Java for phone, Java for toaster...
At some point, the public mind starts to associate "programming" with Java. Since there were (and probably always will be, unless we evolve into utopia) hordes of job-desperate people who would do anything to feed themselves and their families, a lot of them hear about Java, start programming in Java and develop their whole world around Java. Java helps them with this by providing this huge, Java-centric ecosystem which gives you everything you ever need to do whatever you want to do.
Of course, there is also the fact that Java is a managed environment and makes it a lot harder for programmers to write broken code, which makes large-scale programming possible even if all you have is a horde of mediocre programmers. But then again, that property is not unique to Java.
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#63Is there a reason to use Oracle's closed-source Java implementation instead of the opensource implementations? Asking as someone who's ignorant about Java. edit: per comments below, Oracle's Java is open-source too these days.
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Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#64where tf is loom. Async programming is way too toxic.
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Licensing. Oracle requires a commercial license
You can get a paid commercial support license for Oracle's JDK to get an extended maintenance window. But Oracle's publicly available builds don't require a paid license. However,they only provide public builds of the current Java version. If you want LTS, you have to pay them or use another vendors builds.
That's changed a bit. As of JDK 17, Oracle offers Oracle JDK builds under the NFTC license [1], free for use in production with updates overlapping the next LTS version.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it has a relative speed performance over languages that are interpreted (runtime). It also has an ecosystem of tooling to monitor and profile built both into the JDKs and by teams across Silicon Valley (eg first class bazel support). I’m in one of these companies now, and while I’m certainly productive using Java, it’s also got huge downside in the community which these companies don’t really care about. Neve…
Actually, i like it for basic desktop apps, because it just works, and i stay clear of the last 12 years of front-end dumpster fires, where nothing that is over 18 months old, can build, compile or get support anymore. In my day job, I inherit "fun" tasks as 'get this thing someone glued together with webpack4 and frontend-du-jour to work with webpack5 in 2022. Java thank you, any day of the week.
There are a lot of problems in the JS and Swift communities, as there are for Java.
I think you’ve got to meet your customer where they are, and if you can ship Java desktop apps, and they’re happy… keep going.
But you’re not shipping apps to their iPhones using Java. It’s either JS or Swift.
And, on Android it’s JS or Kotlin.
So the common target is JS.
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#67Is there a reason to use Oracle's closed-source Java implementation instead of the opensource implementations? Asking as someone who's ignorant about Java. edit: per comments below, Oracle's Java is open-source too these days.
For some purposes a tested validated binary may be appropriate vs mystery meat someone threw through a compiler then shipped without testing.
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java developers are cheap and easy to find. There are libraries for everything that you would need - AWS SDK, Redis, etc. Performance is tolerable and can be improved with things like Micronaut and native ahead of time compilation (GraalVM).
They're not cheap :) or -- I'm not sure what you mean by cheap, but good Java coders are generally amongst the best paid ones.
it's really bimodal imo, there's a tier of sweatshop contractor job that pays $50-70k (or did before salaries got nuts the last few years) and then senior jobs pay $140k ish average now. Senior getting paid more isn't new but it seems like maybe a 2x ratio is higher than elsewhere.
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle's builds of Java are open source as well. The OpenJDK codebase is shared across all of the vendors that provide builds.
Thanks! So why would I pick Oracle's implementation?
Depends. Many companies want to rely on long-term supported versions with security/stability updates directly from the folks that wrote a majority of the code in the JDK itself. Also as noted above, Oracle offers the Oracle JDK under a free-in-production license with overlap with the next LTS giving users time to upgrade.
Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
#70What are some good resources to learn Java? I only heard about this book being _really_ good https://www.amazon.com/Java-Beginners-Guide-Herbert-Schildt/...