Nick Small introduces Batman.js, explaining what it is good for and why one should use it. By Nick Small

Pavlo Baron presents code samples when in his opinion Erlang is a better fit than Java. By Pavlo Baron

SpringOne2GX Day 1 Wrap Up: Washington DC is alive with Spring, Groovy and Grails developers at our largest SpringOne 2GX event to date! Last night Adrian Colyer, Juergen Hoeller, Mark Pollack, and Graeme Rocher kicked off the show to a packed room of 1000+ developers in the Washington Hilton, talking about new application architecture for enterprise Java developers for: Intelligent Data: performing fast queries against large and unstructured data Intelligent Clouds: Push to Cloud models, Quality of Service, Elasticity, Scalability Intelligent Clients: support for HTML5, REST and HATEOAS driven user interface Architecture Evolution: from server side apps toward “Applications and Services” Grails Evolution: building a single page web application with angular.js and mongoDB This year we are recording all the Spring (but not the Groovy / grails) sessions in HD quality, so if you missed the show, don't worry! We'll be releasing session recordings at a steady rate over the next few months on www.springsource.org, so check back on the website often. Dan Miller?@hockeymann44 I wish the content and format of other technical conferences could be more like SpringOne2GX nckles?@blunck2 wow. spring data rest is awesome! jeffscottbrown?@jeffscottbrown Speaking at SpringOne/2GX next week, for me the most important JVM conference of the year. Splunk?@splunk At SpringOne to learn about Enterprise Developer tools for wrangling dev projects or bigdata projects? Check Splunk http://dev.splunk.com Cedric Champeau?@CedricChampeau Full room for @venkat_s talk "Design patterns in Groovy" pic.twitter.com/DrOXWZ9o Colin Harrington?@ColinHarrington Burt's Programming Grails book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024750.do ... JDriven @jdriven_nl Rob Winch's talk about #thymeleaf is pretty cool. Can't wait to try it out. Might have short term use for it. corinne @corinnekrych #groovy DSL talk with @glaforgeand @werdnagreb at 4:30pm in Georgetown room, wish I was there Dierk Konig?@mittie Thx everybody for the #s2gx tweets. Keep them coming for us lazy stay-at-homers.

Oracle has released two updates of Java, and strongly recommends that all users update. Java SE 7 Update 9 This releases address security concerns. Oracle strongly recommends that all Java SE 7 users upgrade to this release. JavaFX 2.2.3 is now bundled with the JDK on Windows, Mac and Linux x86/x64. Download Release Notes Java SE 6 Update 37 This releases address security concerns. Oracle strongly recommends that all Java SE 6 users upgrade to this release. Download Release Notes

The company has positioned Dart as JavaScript rival, but it hasn't had the kind of browser support that JavaScript has

The September/October issue of Java Magazine is now out, with several great Java stories, including: Liquid Robotics charts a new course with expert help from Java pioneer James Gosling.

Summary of the jam-packed JavaOne 2012 conference.

Learn how to get Linux and Java SE Embedded running on the Raspberry Pi in less than an hour. The Raspberry Pi is a small, low-power board hardly larger than a credit card.

JavaOne Latin America 2012 will provide sessions by experts from the worldwide Java community, full of leading-edge content.

Oracle has a build of an new Applet that will assist in the removal of older versions of the JRE. The Applet is available for testing on http://java.com/uninstall-tool . Please try and provide feedback.

Stephan Jannsen talks about the new Devoxx 4 Kids that he launched this last weekend in Belgium.

In this video, people from Latin America and other countries talk about their experiencies attending JavaOne and OOW.

Developer Justyna Walkowska checks in with Polish JUG's to ask them how their summer was going and what are their plans for the upcoming weeks.

Red Hat and Zend joined together to bring PHP development into the enterprise. What do developers think of the move?

Earlier this year I briefly mentioned SAP HANA and the fact that it was available for developer use on AWS. Today, SAP announced HANA One, a deployment option for HANA that is certified for production use on AWS available now...

For today's episode of The AWS Report, I spoke with Patrick McBride of Xceedium to learn more about their Xsuite Cloud product. which runs on AWS (including the Virtual Private Cloud and the AWS GovCloud): Xceedium is a Platinum sponsor...

Away from the big-name keynotes at JAX London like Brian Goetz and Doug Cutting, there were tens of other sessions going on in the six rooms at Park Plaza Victoria. Even between our three writers Elliot Bentley, Chris Mayer and Anna Kent, we still only managed to catch just a small number. Here’s our picks of the first day. Ted Neward’s first talk of JAX London, introduced with an epic movie-like soundtrack, was on node.js, the fashionable new application for running server-side Java. Living dangerously, Neward downloaded the latest version of node.js as he opened the talk - but thankfully his live demos went off without a hitch. The talk itself was mostly a crash course in JavaScript and its quirks, as well as a quick tutorial in setting up a basic but function node.js server. Although a rich ecosystem has already begun to emerge around node.js, said Neward, it’s still nowhere near as mature or reliable as existing alternatives. John-Matthew Holt used his presentation to showcase the features of Waratek Cloud VM for Java, which we profiled on JAXenter last month, and to announce the opening of new offices based in London and New York. (eb) To start off Big Data Con, Tim Berglund provided an excellent introduction to the scalable potential of Cassandra. From the outset, Githubber Berglund explained that much of the head scratching surrounding the key-value database had come from the array of explanatory blog posts containing misinformation. Berglund showed that Cassandra’s data model was, in fact, pretty simple to grasp once you get going. Once the grounding was in place, Acunu’s Tom Wilkie ramped it up a notch, showcasing some of Acunu’s analytics products that were in use at black cab app Hailo and at MixCloud. Those who came away from the two talks now had the ideal introduction to the possibilities that Cassandra holds. (cm) A talk called ‘Curing Agile Hangover with Craftsmanship’ saw Sandro Mancuso and Mashooq Badar bouncing back and forth ideas and solutions to many problems that they have come across. Starting with a brief history of the company and how it has come to adopt Agile in its daily working routine, they then ventured into the problems which were created as a result of adopting Agile, especially when it got to the testing stage. One major problem they found was that teams working on the same projects across the globe has resulted in a low morale. The lack of communication has meant that the teams are often extremely competitive, which means it then becomes less about their passion for Agile, and more simply a sense of trying to outdo each other. They noted that at times there was a lack of focus on quality, poor ROI and low quality software. We need to adapt a new culture of learning, said Badar - “writing code is not all that we [developers] do”. (ak) To round up the day of sessions, the London Java Community trio of the Diabolical Developer Martijn Verburg, Richard Warburton and James Gough deciphered some of the buzzwords and in our industry in a humourous roleplay. Verburg, donning his obligatory shades and beanie, played the role of a CTO of a trendy startup, but was quickly found out as a bluffer. Fortunately, the straight-talking Gough and Warburton were on hand to guide through financial, technical and computer science jargon. (cm)

The second keynote of JAX London Day One was provided by Big Data royalty - the creator of Lucene, Nutch and the ubiquitous Big Data platform Hadoop, Doug Cutting gave us a glimpse into the future for Hadoop, as well as charting its humble origins. Big Data Con London’s banner keynote saw Cutting begin with the inception Hadoop, after seeing Google’s initial distributed File System and MapReduce in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Cutting explained from there on in, he (amongst others no doubt) “immediately saw the applicability”. Yahoo! were the first to see the platform’s potential as the ‘kernel of the Big Data ecosystem’, and Cutting joined in 2006 to help make the automation of the laborious distributed process a reality. Ten engineers initially took on the challenge of maturing the technology, and scaling across 1000s of commodity servers. Yahoo!’s intentions of making it open source were a big draw for Cutting, who now acts as Apache Software Foundation Chairman, as well as working as Cloudera's Chief Architect. He added that “running on commodity hardware makes a big difference. Doing something at ten times the cost means it can run ten times further”. The rest they say is history – Hadoop was adopted early by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but Cutting believes the platform is robust and reliable enough to be used throughout the enterprise world– citing use cases within healthcare and financial sectors, amongst others. Interestingly, Cutting admitted during the keynote that alone, the core storage and computational components of Hadoop weren’t groundbreaking, but their real power comes in unison provided the “real scalability”. “MapReduce is the hammer, all data looks like nails” insisted Cutting before adding “it solves a wide reach of problems. It’s not ideal for all but its impressive in the number [of problems] it addresses. He continued: “The interesting part is the reliability – that’s why people use this. That’s not easy to get, but once it’s there, the framework acts as a basis”. It’s really quite astounding see how Hadoop has blossomed over the past few years. Cutting went on to detail the astounding number of Big Data projects that have spawned around the HDFS/MapReduce project.   Cutting highlighted the NoSQL project HBase as one Big Data project within the ecosystem that was deserving of its attention, due to its “complimentary” nature within the whole project. The first non-batch component of the BigTop distribution was even proclaimed by Cutting as the basis for future systems of that nature. Despite its slow pickup rate, Cutting proclaimed that HBase had still attained rapid adoption. Finally, the Hadoop creator tackled the question we were most keen to hear – what is the Holy Grail of Big Data? What could provide the linear scaling and the global reliability that the business world craves? The answer according to Cutting could be within Google’s recent paper Spanner. “It’s an impressive piece of work and gives me great optimism looking at the framework that it has legs”, said Cutting. Just like with Hadoop, Google appears to be leading the way for Big Data. We were informed that 26 authors took part in the Spanner publication over 5 years, showing their commitment to the cause. We may not be there yet, but given their track record, you’d be foolish to bet against Spanner and what it can do. Stay tuned for the keynote session in the following weeks, as well as a brief interview with Doug himself. Assorted Tweets: Big Data; scalability (distributed, reliable, affordable), schema on read, data beats algorithms. #hadoop #JAXLondon — Bruce Durling (@otfrom) October 16, 2012 An Apache version of Google Spanner would be the Big Data ‘holy grail’, but is at least five years away, says @cutting #jaxlondon — JAXenter.com (@JAXenterCOM) October 16, 2012

In a One To Watch last month, we looked at Waratek Cloud VM for Java, an Oracle-certified JVM with “attributes like multi-tenancy, like elasticity, like utility computing and control” provided by the ability to run virtual containers inside of each JVM instance. Having announced the general release of Cloud VM at JavaOne, parent company Waratek today used their JAX London talk to break the news of their new London and New York offices, as well as two key staff acquisitions. Martin Hand, previously in charge of VMware’s European distribution for vFabric, will be heading up the London branch as Business Development Director, while John Williams is leaving Progress Software to run Waratek’s New York office. We caught up with Waratek CEO Brian Maccaba at JAX London, who said that the company found the reception at JavaOne to be “fantastic”, adding: “We were flat out all the way - it was crazy.” Regarding the new recruits, Maccaba said that he hoped their expertise in related markets would help Waratek gain traction. “Martin obviously understands a related space very well - VMware have been a hugely successful company,” he said. “I guess to some extent we view ourselves as the next generation of virtualisation.” Williams’ focus, meanwhile, will be the “Wall Street patch”. Maccaba said that Williams’ strength comes from a background of “dealing with some of the largest, most sophisticated banks and brokers in Wall Street”. The company initially set up shop in Dublin, Ireland, which CTO and Founder John Matthew Holt described to JAXenter last month as “the Silicon Valley of Western Europe”. However, Maccaba said today that the decision to set up further offices was driven by a need to go to where the majority of the customers are based. “Dublin is a great place to have our R&D centre,” he said. “[But] where are the big customers? Well, London and New York are two of the main places. Obviously there are other places, but this is our first big step in terms of going to market, by having a proper presence in both cities.”

Supersonic is a query engine library for columnar databases providing a set of data transformation primitives that Google advertises to be "ultra-fast." By Abel Avram

Taking to the stage for the opening keynote of JAX London, Java Language Architect Brian Goetz spoke of the challenges of evolving a language as established as Java, focusing on Java 8’s headline feature, Lambdas. He started by giving a mention the London Java Community, who helped run a workshop exploring the new feature in partnership with JAX London over the weekend, and were presented with a Duke’s Choice award recently at JavaOne. Proclaiming he has “the best job in the world”, Goetz then presented a pie chart illustrating “what people think I do”, including “being a jerk on mailing lists”, “stealing features from other languages”, and mostly “syntax”. What people think @briangoetz does #jaxlondon twitter.com/jr0cket/status… — John Stevenson (@jr0cket) October 16, 2012 On a following slide titled "what (it feels like) I actually do”, the majority was taken up with “compatibility”, as well as “keeping features out” (to stop it getting “out of hand”, said Goetz) and “regretting serialisation” (“It was an awful idea 17 years ago when it was created, and we’re still regretting it”). Goetz noted: “The slices for adding things are really quite small, and the slices for identifying things we shouldn’t add are really quite big.” Yet, that doesn't mean there shouldn’t be any progress. “In the eight years since Java 5, there’s been kind of a lull in the evolution of the platform,” he said, “and we’re trying to make up for lost time.” When adding new features, said Goetz, there are a number of things to consider: adapting to change and righting past wrongs, while maintaining both compatibility and keeping the language “true to the spirit of Java”. Goetz then moved on to the meat of the keynote, focusing on the introduction of closures (or, as they are know in Java, Lambdas) to Java 8. With a history dating back to experimental “pizza” work in 1997, he admitted that “it’s been a long journey, and it’s nice to be nearly at the end of that”. Whilst back in 1995, when Java was first released, closures were considered “too hard” for ordinary developers, today Java is “the last holdout”, said Goetz, and now we are living in a “parallel world” it no longer makes sense to use sequential logic. He noted a key inspiration for this work was Guy Steele’s presentation “How to think about parallel programming - not!”. Utilising an example where a ‘for’ loop was rewritten to use a Lambda and Collection.forEach, Goetz illustrated how “what” and “how” could be decoupled, allowing responsibility to be moved to the library. “It’s a small, seemingly innocuous change that changes a lot of things,” said Goetz. Another example was of sorting a list by surname, which today would involve at least five lines and a Comparator. Using Lambdas, it is now possible with just one line of code - and it also looks more like problem statement. “We could have done this with innerClass, but we wouldn’t have bothered,” he said. Summing, Goetz admitted: “We’re catching up with the competition - it’s the truth.” But he was positive that this new feature will empower library developers while “gently pushing [Java users] towards functional programming, without using the F word”. He finished by stating that “there’s a lot more work to do”, including dealing with the primitive-reference divide, adding more parallel libraries, and support for value types and tuples, as well as computation GPUs. Still, at least it Lambdas are very nearly here. Photo by John Stevenson.

Curator's note: This tutorial originally appeared at the Windows Azure Java Developer Center. Preview Text: When you finish this tutorial, you'll be able to create a virtual machine that runs a compute-intensive Java application that can be monitored by another Java application. Legacy Sponsored: ...

Need to use POSIX APIs but the development platform doesn't support them (such as z/OS)? Don't let that hold you back. Learn how you can implement POSIX Semaphore APIs using System V Semaphore APIs to bring your code to more platforms and keep it maintainable.

Various functional languages and frameworks feature many of the same abstractions and behaviors but name them differently. In this Functional thinking article, series author Neal Ford optimizes the solution from the preceding installment by improving the algorithm and adding caching, illustrating how each language or framework accommodates the required changes.