Google's Jib Gaining Traction in the Broader Java Dev Ecosystem

Google introduced the beta version of its open-source Jib tool for containerizing Java applications in July 2018 with relatively little fanfare. Two years later, the tool has put on some serious muscle in the form of new features and plug-ins, and quietly become a developer favorite.

Jib is an open-source Java tool maintained by Google for building Docker images of Java applications. Jib 1.0.0, released to general availability last year, was designed to eliminate the need for deep Docker mastery. It effectively circumvented the need to install Docker, run a Docker daemon, and/or write a Dockerfile.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 25, 20200 comments

A Roundup of Red Hat Revelations from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon

So much Red Hat news has been coming out of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020 Virtual event this week that it has been hard to keep up. We reported earlier on the spotlight announcements around its dev tools for Kubernetes. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. The IBM subsidiary has had a busy week!

Posted by John K. Waters on August 20, 20200 comments

The Facial Rec Tech Wreck

Facial recognition technology has been taking it on the chin lately (pardon the pun). Earlier this week, the BBC reported that a UK court ruled the use of the technology by British police violated human rights and data protection laws in that country. A week before that, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago unveiled Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool that makes pixel-level changes to your image that are invisible to the human eye, but effectively mask you from the current crop of facial recognition applications. And back in July, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were sued over claims they used photos of individuals to train their facial recognition software without getting prior consent, which violated an Illinois biometric privacy statute. (Facebook had already settled a class-action claim that it also violated that law.)

Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 20200 comments

JetBrains Kicks Off Product Release Binge with New IntelliJ IDEA IDE

Software development toolmaker JetBrains, has been on a bit of a product-release binge that started on July 28 with the release of IntelliJ IDEA 2020.2 , which was followed by the releases of the IntelliJ Scala Plugin 2020.2 ,   PyCharm 2020.2 More

Posted by John K. Waters on August 12, 20200 comments

Oracle's March Madness-Style Java Bracket

Oracle's Java Platform Group created a March Madness-style bracket to mark Java's 25th anniversary, substituting JEPs for the college basketball teams and using Twitter polls to determine the winners of the matchups.

The "Best of the JDK Feature Face-Off" concluded last week, with JDK Mission Control edging Records in the final round.

Posted by John K. Waters on July 16, 20200 comments

Eclipse Foundation Releases 2020 Jakarta/Java Survey Findings

The Eclipse Foundation has been busy since the organization announced its move to Belgium last month. It announced the first milestone release of Jakarta EE 9, and published a white paper about open source in Europe and it just posted the results of its 2020 Jakarta EE Developer Survey. 

Based on the responses of several thousand enterprise developer, the survey provides a fascinating look at the growth of open source enterprise Java, as well as some details on what developer interest in things like microservices and platforms. More

Posted by John K. Waters on June 25, 20200 comments

Java at 25: Pluralsight's Teachers Weigh In

Oracle kicked off its celebration of Java's 25th anniversary, which arrived officially on Saturday, with ... you guessed it: online content. It's disappointing not to be able to celebrate the language and platform that is, let's face it, running world IRL. But Big Red mounted an able effort on its "Moved-by-Java" site with inspiring personal stories from its Java team and the larger Java community, many of which are genuinely inspiring. If you haven't already, be sure to check it out.

Posted by John K. Waters on May 29, 20200 comments

Mike Milinkovich Explains Eclipse Foundation's Move To Belgium

The Eclipse Foundation is moving its headquarters to Belgium, the organization has just revealed. One of the world's leading open-source software foundations, steward of the Eclipse IDE, enterprise Java, and the Eclipse MicroProfile, and the heart of a global ecosystem of developers, companies, and public sector entities, is pulling up stakes and heading for Brussels.

Well, figuratively speaking. More

Posted by John K. Waters on May 13, 20200 comments

Red Hat's OpenShift Update Strategy: If You Want Alpha/Beta Kubernetes Features, You Can Have Them

Red Hat has been making a lot of news over the past two weeks, with product and services announcements fairly gushing from the Red Hat Summit online event last week, as well as IBM's online Think event, which is wrapping up today.

Posted by John K. Waters on May 7, 20200 comments