The Virtual Technology Summit (VTS) delivers interactive Java tech content from Java Champions and Oracle experts to your desk.  

These interactive, online events, sponsored by the Oracle Technology Network (OTN), are coming in November:

• Americas - Tuesday November 18th - 9am to 12:30pm PT / 12pm to 3:30pm  ET / 1 to 4:30 pm BRT*


• APAC English – Wednesday November 19th  / IST – 10:00am / SG – 12:30pm / AEST – 2:30pm
  - Registration Open Soon
  
• EMEA – Wednesday, November 26th / 9am to 1pm BST / 10am – 2pm CET / 12pm to 4pm MSK / GST

Each event feature four technical tracks, each with a unique focus on specific tools, technologies, and tips: Java, Database, Middleware and Systems. Registration allows you to attend any session on any track.

The Java Track includes three code-heavy sessions: 

Transform Your Code to Java 8
by Venkat Subramanian, Java Champion

The new facilities in Java 8 are about to change the way we write code. Our code will become more expressive and concise. But exactly how? This presentation takes several common Java code examples, discusses the core idea expressed in the code, and transforms that code to use the facilities in Java 8. Watch and interact as you see Java code go through a weight loss program right in front of your eyes.

Java Mission Control for Earthlings
by Jim Weaver, Java Evangelist, Oracle

Java SE Advanced contains an application named Java Mission Control, which consists of two facilities essential for developers and IT production support.  These facilities are JMX Console and Java Flight Recorder, both of which help you monitor applications and tune them for high performance.  This session will present features of Java Mission Control, as well as relevant concepts.

Exploring Java EE
by Josh Juneau, Java Champion

The Java EE tutorial will walk users step-by-step through the development of an application (MoviePlex) using Maven. The development will take place within NetBeans 8.x IDE, it will demonstrate how to add project dependencies via Maven, and perform various development tasks leveraging some new features of Java EE 7.  We’ll delve into the creation of views using JSF and PrimeFaces, binding to managed bean controllers via CDI, utilization of the Batch Processing API, JMS, and WebSockets.  In the end, you will have a better understanding of how a typical Java EE application is developed, and how to implement solutions using some of the latest features of Java EE. Note: This a hands-on lab that requires you to have Java EE and the NetBeans IDE downloaded before you attend the session.

We'll kick off the track with Java Community Update by Tori Wieldt. There will be places to hang out and meet other attendees between sessions. View the full agenda, abstracts, and participation instructions on the VTS Event Resources Community Space. Plan to be there!

Oracle has released Java SE 8 Update 25 and Java SE 7 Update 71 and 72. Developers can download the latest Java SE JDK and JRE at the Oracle Technology Network.

Java SE 8 Update 25

This release includes important security fixes. Oracle strongly recommends that all Java SE 8 users upgrade to this release. Read the Release Notes. Download Java SE 8 Update 25.

Java SE 7 Update 71/72 

These releases includes important security fixes. Oracle strongly recommends that all Java SE 7 users upgrade to one of these releases.

What is the difference between a Java CPU (7u71) and PSU (7u72) release?

Java SE Critical Patch Updates (CPU) contain fixes to security vulnerabilities and critical bug fixes. Oracle strongly recommends that all Java SE users upgrade to the latest CPU releases as they are made available. Most user should choose this release.

Java SE Patch Set Updates (PSU) contain all of the security fixes in the CPUs released up to that version, as well as additional non-critical fixes. Java PSU releases should only be used if you are being impacted by one of the additional bugs fixed in that version.

Read the Release Notes. Download Java SE 7 Update 72/71.

Still confused? Java CPU and PSU Releases Explained.

by guest blogger Arun Gupta

300+ kids, 16 speakers (4 from middle/high school), 6 rooms, 24 sessions of 75 mins each = extremely rewarding weekend + inspired kids!

And the name is Silicon Valley Code Camp 2014 Kids Track.

300+ kids, wow! Is that the biggest known event focused on getting kids excited in technology ? 

The event covered topics ranging from Minecraft modding, Building your first iOS app, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Python, LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch, Squishy Circuits, and a whole lot more.

Many thanks to all the attendees, volunteers, parents, and of course Silicon Valley Code Camp organizers, especially Peter Kellner (@pkellner) for providing all the support to educate and inspire kids!

We’d love to have your kid deliver workshops for us next year. Help us increase the young presenters more. We’d also love female presenters, help us create gender balance in this otherwise imbalanced industry :-)

We’ll be back next year, bigger and better. Feel free to leave feedback on my blog.

Are you interested in opening a local Devoxx4Kids chapter in your city ?

Join www.meetup.com/Devoxx4Kids-BayArea if you are interested in an event that provides technology workshops for kids through out the year.

Original blog (with a lot more pictures) published here. 

by guest blogger Scott Hommel

The Java SE documentation team is conducting a brief survey at the following URL:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/java-se-documentation-survey-2014

Answering it will provide us with key insights into the kinds of developer documentation that you (our readers) are looking for. Thank you in advance. We value your input very much!

The next Oracle Academy Ask the Oracle Experts webcast will cover "Oracle OpenWorld/ JavaOne Recap, or How to Get the Most out of a Technology Conference." If you are a student or a developer new to the world of tech conferences, this a great opportunity to get started. We'll cover questions like "How do you know what sessions to attend?" "How can students find opportunities to network?" and "What are the behind-the-scenes things that go on at a tech conference?" You can tweet your questions live during the call, just use #OracleExperts. 

Date and Time: October 8, 2014, 9:00 a.m. PDT

Speakers:
Chris Jones: Senior Principal Product Manager
Susan Flierl: Product Strategy Director
Tori Wieldt: Senior Java Community Manager

Register: Go to the Ask the Experts page to register and get more information.

This session will be recorded for playback. Previous Ask the Oracle Experts webcasts, covering topics such as Cloud Computing, Big Data, and What Do I Do with a Computer Science Degree? are available for WebEx download or viewing on the Oracle Academy YouTube channel.

For example, check out Stephen Chin's "What's New with Java" webcast:

By Guest Blogger Bob Larsen, Java.net editor

Stuart Marks, principal member of technical staff at Oracle, facilitated a fantastic discussion about lambda expressions during JavaOne. A panel of gurus offered their diverse perspectives and answered questions about lambdas submitted via Twitter. The panel included Maurice Naftalin, principal developer at Morningside Light; Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle; Raoul-Gabriel Urma, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge; David Blevins, founder of Tomitribe; and Trisha Gee, Java engineer at MongoDB.

The panel opened with Urma, Naftalin, and Goetz discussing the inclusion of functional programming features, via lambdas and streams, into the Java language. The inclusion of these features allows Java developers access to these features without changing the nature of the language itself, they said.

Gee then described how MongoDB is moving toward the inclusion of lambdas and streams without losing compatibility with earlier versions of Java. This can be accomplished, she said, by exposing single-method interfaces and stream-like APIs, which both allow and encourage those using the library to use these new features without requiring the library itself to be compiled against older versions of Java.

Later, the discussion turned to when it is and is not appropriate to use lambdas. The panelists discussed how passing blocks of code longer than a single line into a lambda expression can easily make the lambda expression difficult to read and maintain. Method references allow the use of lambdas in these situations without reducing code clarity.

Because the Stream API makes parallelism so easy to implement, there is a great concern that it will be overused. “The problem with parallelism is that it’s too easy. You can just plunk it in there, and people see it as a magic incantation for extra speed,” said Gee. The panel quickly reached consensus that initially people will overuse it, and that there is no substitute for proper testing and benchmarking in a production-like environment. Goetz also pointed out that there is an extreme focus on performance, and reminded the audience that there is no reason to even think about performance tuning unless there is a business reason to do so. Frequently, the simple and easily understood code runs fast enough to meet the requirements, he said.

The conversation also ventured into the weaknesses in the current lambdas feature, mostly around exceptions. Checked exceptions do not play well with lambdas. One suggestion was simply to make the lambda expression throw an exception. Goetz explained that this was considered in the crafting of the spec. He said it is really a bad idea; it would require every lambda expression to be surrounded by a try-catch block, the catch statement must catch all exceptions, and the loss of precision should make us all “feel dirty.” Another potential problem is exception reporting; stack traces involving lambdas can be quite confusing to those not familiar with them.

The discussion closed with the panelists encouraging the audience to use Java 8—even if it is only in nonproduction situations, such as writing tests. They also pointed out that many Java developers will be learning a new programming paradigm and that they shouldn’t avoid using these features just because they don’t want to make mistakes.

By Guest Blogger Timothy Beneke
The final keynotes of JavaOne took place on Thursday, with the Intel, Technical, and Community keynotes. These keynotes cast strong glances both backward and forward at the platform and celebrated new technologies, especially related to the Internet of Things.

Intel Joins OpenJDK
Intel’s Michael Greene, vice president of system technologies and optimization at Intel’s Software and Services Group, took the stage and announced that Intel is joining the Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK) community and will contribute math library functions that should boost big data analytics performance for machine learning.

Technical Keynote
Mark Reinhold appeared and briefly reprised his Technical keynote. Then Brian Goetz offered a vision of Java extending to Java 9 and beyond that would include value classes. Look to Project Valhalla and Project Panama for more information.

James Gosling Reflects on Java
Next, several Java luminaries—including the father of Java, James Gosling—took questions. After being asked if he regretted null pointers, Gosling quickly replied that he did not because all of the available alternatives at the time were far worse.
Gosling went on to explore why Java did not have generics from the beginning. Bill Joy, Java’s cofounder, wanted to include generics, a source of considerable conflict in 1994, but Gosling insisted that there was an insurmountable problem: Which generics do you use? Dozens of languages with generics already existed, and they all had problems. Gosling stuck to a basic principle he adhered to in creating Java: Never do the wrong thing.
When asked when Java would become obsolete, Gosling confessed that for a decade he has been expecting Java’s demise, but that Java is a kind of organism grounded in the community that is well understood and flexible and has strong staying power.
Later, Gosling reminisced about the origins of Java. “Everyone says that Java is approaching its 20th anniversary, but for me it’s the 25th,” he explained. He said that many Sun engineers were troubled in 1990 by the very primitive processors they saw in much consumer electronics—they thought the world was missing out. They took a long trip to Europe and Asia and studied primitive cell phones, elevators, lighting systems, and other gadgetry, and discovered that electrical engineers were needlessly reinventing old computer science problems. At the time, the internet was solid but not popular. Gosling credited Mike Sheridan, who was a business development person on the team, with inventing Java because he invented the reason for Java.

James Weaver: Java Show-and-Tell
Next, Oracle’s genial Java Technology Ambassador James Weaver took the stage, and reminded attendees that all sessions could be viewed on Parleys.com. A parade of talented developers and technologists followed.

Andra Kay, director at Silicon Valley Robotics, said, “By 2020 your household robot will be your house.”

Bruno Maisonnier, CEO at Aldebaran, a world leader in humanoid robots, presented a video showing robots teaching children mathematics in schools, and interacting with customers in stores. Maisonnier said that robots must (1) be cute, so that people enjoy them; (2) interact naturally in their body language and gestures; and (3) be easy to use.

Paul Perrone of Perrone Robotics lamented the 30,000 deaths from auto accidents each year in the United States, and showed a video about his automated vehicle testing system with an advanced braking system that could save lives—a first step toward cars with full autonomy.

Others featured included

•  Johan Vos of LodgON on JavaFX on the Android
•  Distinguished Java Champion Adam Bien on Java 8 and Java EE
•  Jeff Martin of ReportMill Software using Java to teach kids how to program
•  Alison Derbenwick Miller of Oracle Academy showing a video about how Oracle is spreading programming knowledge around the world
• Duke’s Choice Award Winners
• IoT Developer Challenge Winners

The Community keynote was the perfect ending to a great week of information sharing, learning, and community building.

Watch the Community keynote.

By Guest Blogger Timothy Beneke

Oracle’s Java Technology Ambassador Stephen Chin presented the “Internet of Things Magic Show” session before a packed crowd on Wednesday morning at JavaOne. The session made it clear—as has much of JavaOne 2014—that with a little ingenuity, persistence, and a Raspberry Pi, Java developers can easily deploy their skills to create IoT magic shows of their own. Chin emphasized the strength of Java for the IoT space, especially now that the divide between Java SE and Java ME has been dramatically narrowed with Java 8. “Java ME as a language is almost the same as Java SE minus lambdas,” observed Chin, “and a prototype of lambdas for Java ME is well on its way. Also, a lot of Java SE APIs are finding their way to Java ME as well.”

Fun with Mr. Grabby
He presented a small smart robot, named Mr. Grabby, that resembles a crab with grippers that can be made to remotely grab and carry a white glowing ball. The robot can then navigate its way around tracks laid down in the form of white tape on the floor.

Mr. Grabby is an autonomous robot using Raspberry Pi and other hardware on top as a controller, plus an Arduino board that uses pin mapping and a motor controller. “Programming the pin assignments right is the biggest issue,” said Chin. “You use software serial on Arduino, where you take any two soft pins and do the serial protocol manually. It uses line follower software, which captures infrared light off the ground through two lights and two sensors; there is an infrared emitting light and another sensor that picks up the infrared. When Mr. Grabby goes off the track, he knows to compensate and follow the lines.”

Chin invited a developer named Mark onstage who successfully took Mr. Grabby around the tracks in a time of 40 seconds. All Mr. Grabby code is available on github.

3-D Printing Magic
Chin then displayed a 3-D printer, which was now busy making a customized bracelet for Mark. The printer has a Raspberry Pi and uses OctoPrint to monitor it remotely. He showed a console that displayed the temperature of the plate and the extruder plus a live video of the bracelet being made.

Software for the printer—known as open constructed geometry software—was designed by Michael Hofer entirely in Java. Hofer leveraged the JavaFX 8 APIs, which now include 3-D support, and built a visual tool for visualizing how 3-D products will look. The code controls space between links, the radius of the sphere, and other pertinent details.

“Printing is done by taking complex shapes and adding and deleting objects from them, so you can delete a bunch of filters from a larger filter to create a space,” explained Chin. Chin illustrated ways that the bracelet could be made bigger and smaller as needed.
He closed by showing a timelapse video of the printer constructing the bracelet.

By Guest Blogger Bob Larsen, Java.net Editor

The Java Community Process (JCP) presented the tenth annual JCP Awards and celebrated its fifteenth birthday at a gathering atop the Hilton Hotel on Monday night.  

Heather VanCura (above, left) received the award for JCP Program Member of the Year for her leadership in the Adopt-a-JSR program, which provides a mechanism for Java User Groups and individuals to easily contribute to Java Specification Requests and encourages grassroots participation in crafting the future of Java. VanCura's effort in organizing and facilitating adoption sessions, workshops, and webinars, as well as in recruiting JUGs, has greatly advanced Adopt-a-JSR's progress.

The Most Significabt JSR was awarded to JSR 360, Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 8. CLDC brings language features from Java SE into Java ME. These features, including generics, enumerations, and try-with-resources, dramatically increase the power and flexibility of Java ME. JSR 360 has been the first update applied to Java ME in almost seven years. Michael Lagally (above, right) was recognized as Outstanding Spec Lead for his efforts in spearheading JSR 360. 

Otávio Gonçalves de Santana (right) was awarded Outstanding Adopt-a-JSR Participant for his efforts in supporting JSR 354, Java Money and Concurrency—specifically in migrating the codebase from Java 7 to Java 8.  Gonçalves de Santana is also a strong supporter of OpenJDK and has been assisting in making JSRs more compatible with OpenJDK from the beginning, streamlining their implementation.

Following the award presentations, the festivities continued with musical acts including the debut performance of the NullPointers, a band composed entirely of Java Community members, followed by birthday cake, and the obligatory out-of-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Read about the JCP Award Nominees

Read about the JCP Award Winners

By Guest Blogger Timothy Beneke

At the Java Hub, Java’s flexibility was illustrated through a number of demos and displays. The message was clear: any Java developer can program in Java Embedded, so get your Raspberry Pi, connect it to your favorite device, and have fun with the Internet of Things (IoT). Aldebaran Robotics presented the friendly, 2-foot-tall, high-tech Nao robot, which can be used to enhance social awareness among autistic children. It danced, gave fist bumps, and seemed to drink in the attention. Across the room, a 3-D printer performed its magic, creating clones of Duke using JavaFX and Oracle Java Embedded.

James Gosling’s Wave Glider
A Liquid Robotics Wave Glider, with software developed by James Gosling, was also on display. Wave Glider, which looks like a souped-up yellow surfboard, is an autonomous water and solar-powered platform that transmits oceanic information such as water temperature and chemistry, wind speed, living organisms, and ocean bottom topography using Java SE Embedded applications for defense, oil and gas, and commercial and science customers.

Wave Glider has two parts, the surfboard-like “float” loaded with solar panels to recharge lithium-ion batteries—which resides at the ocean’s surface—and the sub, equipped with wings and tethered six meters below.  

Java Capabilities for the Green Power Industry
Alexander Belokrylov, product manager for Java ME Embedded, showed off Java ME capabilities for the green power industry, demonstrating how a Java ME Embedded application can control and monitor energy sources on a bicycle-driven electric generator.

“This is just a regular bicycle that illustrates the Raspberry Pi functionality,” explained Belokrylov. “Here it is connected to a bicycle, but it could also function with an irrigation system or many other things. The key point is that with Java ME and no libraries, we can run a fully autonomous system that connects to the cloud and measures energy usage. This is a small footprint and it can do a lot. We want Java developers to take this power and run with it!”

A Car that Knows You
Gary Collins, principal member of technical staff at Oracle, showed off the Telematics Car Demo from Sunday’s Java Strategy keynote, where a simulated electric car used Java ME Embedded data and JavaFX to aggregate and display temperature, speed, light sensor, crash, and other data. “The functionality enables a car to make adjustments for drivers,” explained Collins. “Suppose you drive this car from a rental agency and come back to rent it again. The agency can access data about you and adjust the car for temperature, seating position, preferred radio stations and many other applications. It’s a car that can learn your preferences and patterns.”


Playing with Java SE Embedded
Across from the car simulator, a row of Raspberry Pis interfaced with cubed light bulbs, Sphero Robotic Balls, XY-Plotters for drawing, and more. Attendees were invited to choose an “if statement” and then tweet, send an SMS message using a motion or light sensor, draw their names with a Java or Oracle logo or picture of Duke, and more. Light bulbs could light up in strange ways; a Sphero Ball could act crazy. It was all in the spirit of play to illustrate that Java SE Embedded offers a wide range of possibilities for developers who want to try out the IoT with Java 8.