Java Annotated Monthly — November 2019

In this month’s edition, we have tutorials for Java 13 features, news about Java 14 (and beyond!) features, plus the usual mix of tutorials (largely Spring again this month), news, and Other Interesting Articles. Under the latter category, we have a bunch of articles about working remote. This was also a big month for IntelliJ IDEA blog posts, so we’ve summarized those too.

Java News

News this month is a mish-mash of upcoming release stuff, Java-related-company stuff, and conference stuff.

• Some features for Java 14 have been selected already.
• Helpful NullPointerExceptions are in that list — here’s a more detailed look.
• Java Conferences 2020 – here's a pretty comprehensive list of the Java conferences next year. I’ll probably see you at some of them!
• [FOSDEM] [CfP] Free Tools and Editors devroom at FOSDEM 2020 – speaking of which, please submit your talks for the free tools and editors room at FOSDEM, which we’re helping to host.
• Pivoting – analysis of Pivotal’s ownership, how it works, and why things have changed
• Pivotal, Microsoft team up to deliver Azure Spring Cloud
• Microsoft vs. IBM: A major shift in Java support – lots of news in the last few months about Microsoft’s current focus on Java.
• ‘No more room for wars in the new world’? Who are you and what have you done with Microsoft? – Microsoft joins OpenJDK.
• Amazon joins the Java Community Process (JCP) – it’s good to have Amazon on board the JCP, especially since they have their own distribution of OpenJDK.

Java Tutorials & Tips

• Text Blocks Come to Java – My colleague Mala Gupta covers this feature in Oracle’s Java Magazine
• Inside Java 13’s switch Expressions and Reimplemented Socket API
• Inside the Language: Sealed Types – or “almost final”, expected to appear in some future version of Java
• The 2019 Java Developer Roadmap – or: how to become a competent Java developer. I don’t personally agree 100 percent with everything here but I’ve never seen anything as useful as this before, in terms of all the tools one ought to know as a competent developer.
• Java Should Feel Fun – a reminder that we’re supposed to enjoy coding!
• Become a Master of Java Streams, Part 2: Intermediate Operations
• Using Mutation Testing to Improve Quality of Unit Tests – a coding kata
• A First Look at Inline Classes – previously referred to as “value types”

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, and Technologies

Spring-heavy again this month:

• I’ve started a new tutorial, which is a more in-depth look at building the application from my SpringOne live demo:
  • Tutorial: Reactive Spring Boot Part 1 – A Kotlin REST Service
  • Tutorial: Reactive Spring Boot Part 2 – A REST Client for Reactive Streams
  • I’ll be publishing a new lesson every Monday, keep an eye out…
• Introducing FxWeaver – Dependency Injection Support for JavaFX and FXML – very happy to see that my combination of Spring Boot and JavaFX is not all that unusual
• Creating a Spring Boot JavaFX Application with FxWeaver – this is a step-by-step tutorial. I would very much like to try this out in my new tutorial
• What’s new in Spring Boot 2.2? – the bit that interests me most is the RSocket API
• 14 Tips for Writing Spring MVC Controller
• Spring Transaction Management: An Unconventional Guide
• Key Java @Annotations to build full Spring Boot Rest API – an introduction to annotations
• Introducing Jakarta NoSQL – NoSQL is now mature enough to have a standard way of talking to it described for Jakarta EE
• Jakarta EE 9 – signs point to a big bang – worth reading if you want to understand the future of Java EE/Jakarta EE
• 8 key Kotlin features that give it an edge over Java
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of propagating data through Reactive Streams

Culture & Community

I’m always interested in articles about remote working, being a remote worker myself. This month, quite a few of them cropped up.

• Casual Conversation in Remote Teams – I hadn’t even read this article when I instigated peer 1-to-1s in our team for my own personal benefit, I wanted to feel more connected. It’s working.
• Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive – and yet, it also mentions the value of face-to-face as well
• On Messing Up Your Remote Team—And Then Getting It Right
• More techniques for making agile games remote-friendly
• Acing the DevRel Interview – or: in which ways are interviews for a developer relations role different from traditional software developer interviews?

• The (Real) 11 Reasons I Don’t Hire You – useful advice for candidates, sure, but excellent advice for interviewers who don’t have a clear idea of what their acceptance criteria are (or should be)
• Scaling Developer Teams: Know-How From Amazon, Facebook, and Intercom – Interview with Rich Archbold (podcast and transcript) – including looking at diversity and inclusion
• If Women Don’t Apply to Your Company, This Is Probably Why – none of these should be a surprise to you by now.
• Keynote: Programmers Don’t Like People…or Do They? – we’re better programmers if we have compassion for other humans.
• Developer, Advocate! Tweet it!
• Curiosity as a Service
• Really Know Your Tools
• Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company
• Why it is hard to publish a book with zero errata – or: coding and reviewing is hard
• Sustainable software development – OK, I didn’t read this; it’s very long, but it looks very interesting!

And Finally

A chance to catch up on the other IntelliJ IDEA blog posts from this month. Note that the big thing for us at the moment is the upcoming 2019.3 release.

• Meet Grazie: the ultimate spelling, grammar, and style checker for IntelliJ IDEA
• IntelliJ IDEA 2019.3 EAP5: MongoDB Support and More – all the EAP blog posts are worth reading, but I’m personally very interested in the MongoDB Support (full disclosure: I used to work for MongoDB).
• Introducing Package Search EAP
• Webinar Recording: React+TypeScript+TDD in IntelliJ IDEA – video available now

If you have any interesting or useful Java/JVM news to share via Java Annotated Monthly, leave a comment or drop me a message via Twitter.