Episode 245

Jon talks to Bruno Borges and Mark Heckler about Java development.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 245: Catching up on Java dev with Bruno Borges and Mark Heckler

Links:

Microsoft Build of OpenJDK
Java in Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code Extension Pack for Java
Spine: 2D skeletal animation for games (esotericsoftware.com) written in Java

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Jon Galloway: Hello and welcome to Herding Code. This episode is being recorded on March 11th, 2022. Today I'm talking to Bruno and Mark, and they're going to teach me all about Java because I don't know a thing about it. So welcome folks.

[00:00:22] Bruno Borges: Hey, Hey, Jon, how's it going? Thanks for having us.

[00:00:26] Jon Galloway: Yeah. And so can you introduce yourselves, tell, tell us tell us your background.

[00:00:30] Bruno Borges: Yeah, I said something, you go first.

[00:00:35] Mark Heckler: Well, hi, I'm Mark Heckler. I'm a Java developer for well, a long time now. Java champion Kotlin developer expert. We won't talk about that too much today, but but deepen the JVM and, and loving it and still loving it. So, and I, I work, I guess, on, on the, as an aside, I work in developer relations here at

Microsoft engineering cloud advocate for a Java and JVM languages.

[00:01:00] Jon Galloway: Cool. All right. And Bruno.

[00:01:02] Bruno Borges: Yeah, I'm a PM manager at Microsoft. I lead some of the projects on the BM side, like Microsoft to beautiful JDK and Microsoft's involvement in the Java community. Like our work with the consolidation process. I am also a Java champion. And for those who don't know, Java champion is a program similar to Microsoft MVP, but for Java developers and yeah, it's, it's, it's been my career for, for a long time too long, I would say.

[00:01:33] Jon Galloway: Okay. Well, let me start off with just when one thing, which is like Microsoft Java, how does that fit together? Like why, why is that a.

[00:01:47] Bruno Borges: Five to 10 years because. Because of cloud computing, right. Developers wants to bring stuff to the cloud and Microsoft became a cloud vendor hosts any kind of application. And that includes Java applications. Right. But it's also through the history of Microsoft. And I don't want to go back in time too much because like some experienced Java developers will remind a few things, but in more recent times in the history, Microsoft did a welcome some companies and came up with some solutions that ended up either being developed in Java or using Java based technologies.

So. The big, big data exploded about a decade ago. And in projects like attaching spark and Hadoop that are implemented in Java, ended up being used by every major company, including Microsoft. So, so those systems are in, used in use internally whether it's Microsoft being service or office or Azure infrastructure to behind the scenes, we see those Java based technologies in use.

I've actually cost them more recently. So, so Java and the Java ecosystem and tools are needed for scalable systems. And, and that happens to Microsoft as well. And then Microsoft also welcomed LinkedIn and . And those are technologies that are heavily implemented in Java with thousands of Java developers that now work here in the conflict.

So not only Java is a matter of like, we use the technology, but we also of course offer our tools and services to the customers outside. And the way that they host applications is through Azure at the end of the day.

[00:03:41] Jon Galloway: Okay. Yeah. I was going to say that the big, my main exposure to job over the past several years, thinking about it has been helping my kid with Minecraft, like when she wants to install all the mods and all that kind of stuff. So

[00:03:53] Bruno Borges: Yeah. And the interesting thing is Minecraft today, if you're playing with Minecraft Java tradition, the binary of Java that that is shipped with Minecraft is actually the binary that we build ourselves, the Microsoft beautiful and it's players and developers. Are in sync with their release. They will see that monograph is running on Java 16 already, if not 17 on I'm not sure if the 17, but they did two 16 at the end of last year.

So it's pretty modern, pretty up to date with the Java release history.

[00:04:32] Jon Galloway: Okay. So you mentioned open JDK and what's kind of the, what's the ecosystem like now, as far as like who's developing Java.

[00:04:40] Bruno Borges: Primility who develops. Java is still Oracle. Oracle is the steward of the technology and the platform is the steward of the open JDK. And open JDK is the open source implementation of the Java platform, which enclose the Java language specifications, the JVs pacification, and the Java API. So those three things combined to form the Java platform.

It opens you the key is the open source implementation GPL. But there are lots of contributions. Red hat is a major contributor to the opening, to the key project. IBM Azule systems, bell soft Twitter did some contributions Ali-Baba of Amazon Google in the past. And now Microsoft in, in recent times companies that we imagine like they were, you know, competitors, but still because they saw this technology as a great piece of, of software to do several things at scale, they all got together and said, Hey, let's, let's make something.

And the open JDK where it says a true open source project with a very high quality professionals evolved in major companies behind supporting its development.

[00:05:51] Mark Heckler: And if I can interject something here I, everything is in terms of Java kind of builds around and revolves around the Java community process. And that's not just in names. So you have a lot of, a lot of participants at an individual and corporate and organizational level that kind of come together and help guide, steer, develop specifications and you know, kind of suss out and test out different technologies as they start getting incorporated into Java the specifications. So specifications, I should say. So it's, it's very community driven Oracle kind of services that the central point and, and kind of is the force behind continued development. But there are a lot of, a lot of contributors to that entire process start to finish.

[00:06:33] Jon Galloway: Okay. So let me ask, w let me tell you what I did trying to like get up to speed a little bit with Java, and you can tell me what I should have done. Instead. I am Googled around and I, I saw a Microsoft Java get started, whatever, and I went over to the vs docs page and I installed, or excuse me, the vs code page.

And I installed the extension the Java extension pack, and it installed a bunch of extensions. And then I. a new project. Well, first I went on and I downloaded the open JDK just to make sure that it was installed in the newest thing and stuff. And then I also played with J hipster a bit just cause I'm a web developer and it seemed fun and I was pretty impressed with all of it.

I, you know, there's the usual kind of trying to figure out what is, what is Maven and what is grateful and what is, where's my Java home pointed and that sort of stuff, but it was pretty smooth. And you know, a couple of hours, what, what do you recommend for people getting started with Java development?

[00:07:35] Mark Heckler: That's all, I'll start off with this because that's something that I feel like, and we're certainly not alone in this, but I feel like we could do a better job on getting people. That, that kind of, that first experience you, you, you did a lot of good things there. I don't know that I could necessarily suggest improvements just because there are some rough edges there.

I mean, when, when you're talking about a build tool, if you're not within the Java ecosystem, and if you're not within the Java realm, you're like, what's Maven. What's great. All, you know so you know, vs code with the with a small handful of plugins knocks down, a lot of those mirrors for you if you install the JDK, that would be something that would be kind of awesome.

If we had some kind of like drop this in and everything just works, but there are a couple or three steps that you mentioned I know some folks are very, very fond of rebels and, and J shell and, you know, et cetera. But but ultimately I think it comes down to just finding some good materials that you can kind of get at that gentle introduction, you know, a step at a time.

And i...