July was a very quiet month, news-wise, so August is a leisurely perusal of the bits and bobs that are surfacing this summer.

Java

Here is the usual mixed bag of Java-related news, tutorials, and interesting snippets.

• Stack Overflow Answers the Top Java Questions We Didn’t Know We Had — you will either learn something here that will surprise you or pat yourself on the back for knowing it already!
• Is Boilerplate Code Really so Bad? (video) – here is my presentation from QCon London, showing example code in Kotlin and modern Java.
• Intermediate Java – A Learning Path | Part 1 – I am always asked what’s the next step after learning the basics of Java (syntax etc). These are some reasonable hands-on coding exercises to get more comfortable with the language.
• Effective Java, Third Edition – Keepin’ it Effective
• Is “Java Concurrency in Practice” still valid in the era of Java 8 and 10? – TL;DR: yes.
• Java Magazine, July/August 2018 (free subscription required) – this month’s is all about Java libraries and includes a very useful index of libraries that have been covered by all issues in the past.
• Getting to Know Graal, the New Java JIT Compiler – find out what all the fuss is about!
• OpenJDK Community Update: A Year in the Life with Mark Reinhold (video) – what’s happened in OpenJDK and what’s the overlap with the Oracle JDK?
• Related: Eliminating Java Update Confusion – is Oracle really charging for Java?
• Duke’s Choice Award Nominations – Every year, Oracle gives awards to interesting and innovative Java projects. Individuals or teams can nominate themselves. If you are working on something interesting, I highly recommend going for it, receiving this award on behalf of LMAX at my very first JavaOne changed the course of my career.

Java Future

Java 11 is so close — we can almost smell it. They’ve already moved on to developing Java 12 —thanks to this faster release cadence.

• What Comes After JDK 8? – things are moving faster and in a different way these days.
• New Java 11 Feature: Launch Single-File Source-Code Programs – take a look at scripting with Java!
• JDK 11: New Default Collection Method toArray(IntFunction) – continuing the theme of making it easier to work with collections.
• Optional.isEmpty() Available in JDK 11 EA Builds – simply the opposite of isPresent, but potentially makes code easier to read.
• Java 11 Features – Java Flight Recorder – Flight Recorder used to be a commercial feature of Oracle’s Java and is, now, open source and will be available in JDK 11.
• JDK 12 Early-Access Builds – yes! Java 11 isn’t even out yet, and you can already start working with Java 12.
• Project Loom with Ron Pressler and Alan Bateman (video) – presentation on Project Loom (“implementation of lightweight user-mode threads (fibers), delimited continuations (of some form), and related features”).

Languages, Frameworks, and Libraries

Groovy and Gradle releases among other things.

• Groovy Goodness: Creating Extra Method Supporting Named Arguments Using @NamedVariant Annotation – related: IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 fully supports this feature.
• Apache Releases Groovy 2.5 and Preview of Groovy 3.0 – making the above, for example, available.
• Gradle 4.9 is out.
• In the interest of fairness, and because I missed it last month, Maven 3.5.4 came out in June.
• Monads explained in Kotlin (again)
• What is a reactive microservice? – even if you’re working on one (or more), it’s worth reminding yourself of the concepts.

Culture

• Visual Agility: Why We Model
• Working From Home Is Not Remote Work
• Why Email Is So Stressful, Even Though It’s Not Actually That Time-Consuming – if e-mail is stressing you out, you might find some tips here.
• The Most Creative Teams Have a Specific Type of Cultural Diversity – simply having diversity in the team members isn’t enough.

Events

There are no August events coming up, so, once again, here is a roundup of the autumn conferences that we have booths and speakers at:

• 12-14 Sep: ProgNET, London- Trisha Gee is presenting one of the keynotes.
• 3-5 Oct: KotlinConf, Amsterdam – sold out!
• 4-5 Oct: Software Craftsmanship London – Trisha is talking about Code Review
• 13-14 Oct: Silicon Valley Code Camp, San Jose – we have a booth, and Paul Everitt is presenting
• 19-20 Oct: JokerConf, St Petersburg
• 22-24 Oct: HashiConf, San Francisco
• 22-25 Oct: Oracle Code One, San Francisco (formally JavaOne) – we have the booth, and Eugene Petrenko, Roman Elizarov, and Trisha will be presenting a number of talks and BoFs.
• 29 Oct-1 Nov: O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, London – Trisha is presenting a keynote.
• 12-16 Nov: Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp
• 23-24 Nov: Devoxx Ukraine, Kyiv
• 26-30 Nov: AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas
• 30 Nov-1 Dec: DevTernity, Riga

And, Finally

IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 was released!  This release contains loads of new features of course.  Keep an eye out, because, even now, we’re still releasing more screencasts and blog posts covering the major points.