JavaOne Wrap-Up: Top Third-Party Product Announcements

Oracle and the Java community made relatively few new announcements at the annual JavaOne conference last week, but a number of Java vendors did. Three announcements from local companies stood out for me at this year's show:.

Hazelcast, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of an open-source, In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) solution by the same name, made big news at the show with the launch of its JCache implementation. Hazelcast 3.3.1 JCache, which is the JCache-compatible version of Hazelcast, is now drop-in "pin compatible" with Oracle's Coherence IMDG and Ehcache. Hazelcast CEO Greg Luck wrote the latter, which is one of the most widely used open-source Java caching solutions. Luck is also a co-author of the JCache spec, along with Brian Oliver, who architected Oracle Coherence. Coherence, Ehcache, and Hazelcast are the only JCache implementations currently available.

The JCache project was the longest running Java specification request (JSR) in the history of Java and the Java Community Process (JCP) until it earned approval in March. JSR-107, the spec request for Java Temporary Caching API, specified the semantics for the temporary, in-memory caching of Java objects. The JSR languished for years until Terracotta and Oracle began funding it recently. Terracotta is probably best known for its commercial development of Ehcache.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Coverity launched the free beta of its new cloud-based service for Java developers at the show. The new Code Spotter service, which is built on Coverity's static code analysis platform, is designed to help developers find difficult-to-detect defects in Java code. The service allows Java devs to upload their source code to the cloud, where it is analyzed for known issues in Java code bases, such as resource leaks, race conditions, concurrency issues, and null pointer dereferences. With this new service, the company is "democratizing access" to its testing solution, the company said.

Coverity, which is a subsidiary of Synopsys, launched a "developer-first security" effort last year, during which it began promoting the idea of putting security into the hands of developers. In January, the company released a new version of its dev/test platform that provides Java developers with expanded coverage for the Open Web Application Security Project's (OWASP) Top 10 and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) security vulnerabilities in Java apps. The open-source OWASP identifies 10 of the most critical Web app security risks each year. The CWE is a community project sponsored by the Mitre Corporation to create a catalog of software security vulnerabilities.

Software build and distribution company JFrog launched a new commercial version of its Bintray open-source distro platform at this year's show: Bintray Premium. Bintray, which won a Duke's Choice Award last year, is a cloud platform for developers who want to store, publish, download, promote, and share software. (In other words, all of them.) The San Francicso-based company's commercial version supports "premium repositories," with unlimited storage and downloads, full download stats, access control, and download tracking, among other features.

BTW: The company won a Duke's Choice in 2011 for its Artifactory binary repository manager.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 7, 2014