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| Serverless applications need to start fast. Really fast. Really, really fast. |
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| Week of August 3, 2020 |
We all know that “the cloud” means “software running on someone else’s servers”—and in our world, those servers might contain traditional applications or they might contain cloud native applications architected with microservices.
Speed matters. What you don’t want is a service that’s slow to launch or, more importantly, slow to be fully ready to execute its part of the workload. As Oleg Šelajev reminds us in his article “Java frameworks for the cloud: Establishing the bounds for rapid startups,” we usually pay for consumed resources as we go. “The performance of your code directly affects the cost of running your software in the cloud. Slow means expensive. Fast means cheaper,” Oleg says. However, he adds that “The problem with this seemingly straightforward reasoning is that good performance and worse performance mean different things for different applications; sometimes good performance means good throughput, sometimes it means low memory usage, and sometimes it means a fast cold-start startup time.” The answer, he suggests, may be GraalVM.
The second article, by Arjan Tijms, is for Maven mavens—or those who wish to become Maven mavens. In any case, Arjan teaches how to write your own Maven plugins. As he puts it, there’s more than one benefit to customizing Maven with custom plugins: “As an extra bonus, writing plugins can deepen your understanding of the system those plugins plug in to.” So, let’s get to work.
I’d also like to point out an article not published in Java Magazine. It’s a follow-up to Sharat Chander’s article “The Best of the JDK Face-Off,” which was published in Java Magazine in May. That article launched a reader contest to determine the most important innovation in Java. To make a long story short, a winner was named, and John Waters wrote about it in his story for Application Development Trends, “Oracle’s March Madness-Style Java Bracket.” The contest was a lot of fun. Thank you, Sharat and John.
Are you ready for Java 15? JDK 15 is in Rampdown Phase Two, which means the overall feature set is frozen. Mark your calendars for the launch on September 15; details to come.
New quizzes! We post one each Tuesday, and there’s a nice fresh batch ready for you. Visit Java Magazine or follow us on social media to try the latest challenges from Simon Roberts and Mikalai Zaikin.
Finally, a big shoutout to the New York Java SIG, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in September 2020. Wow!
Take care,
Alan Zeichick
Editor in Chief, Java Magazine
@zeichick |
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| The newest articles |
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Java frameworks for the cloud: Establishing the bounds for rapid startups
Many frameworks offer the functionality needed to create a web application that can respond to HTTP requests. How do you pick the best one? Practical wisdom suggests you should stick to the framework your team knows best and one that is popular enough that it’s easy to find other people who know it sufficiently well. However, as Oleg Šelajev explains, some of the differences can really affect the performance of real-world microservices and applications.
How to write your own Maven plugins
Many Java developer tools can be extended with plugins, which are small pieces of functionality that deeply integrate with the tool to provide useful features. Coders often use prewritten plugins—but it’s easy to create them as well. Since many tools used by Java developers are written in Java, so are the plugins. Arjan Tijms teaches us how to create such plugins for Maven. |
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| The newish articles |
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The Java Optional class: 11 more recipes for preventing null pointer exceptions
Building on his previous article, Mohamed Taman shares 11 more recipes, antipatterns, and design smells to help everyone use the Optional class more effectively. Not only do these recipes help make code more readable, but they also eliminate unpleasant (and disastrous) side effects.
Java Card 3.1 explored
Java Card 3.1 is a major update of the Java Card SDK. A key goal of this release is to ensure the availability of security services on a large range of heterogeneous secure hardware, including smartcards, embedded chips, secure enclaves, and removable SIM cards. Last year, Nicolas Ponsini described many of the services available in the new release. In this article, he digs deeper into the deployment model, core features, and cryptography extensions.
Get started with JavaFX on Raspberry Pi
The inexpensive Raspberry Pi single-board computer is the ideal starting point for experimenting with electronic components—and you can combine that affordable hardware with the software tools you use every day. This article by Frank Delporte walks through the steps needed to build a running JavaFX application on the device.
Streaming analytics with Java and Apache Flink
Eric Bruno explains that with IoT and edge applications, some analytics approaches and frameworks use minibatch processing to approximate real-time analytics. This article explores the use of Apache Flink with a built-in complex event processing engine for a low-latency, real-time streaming analytics solution. |
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