Author Archives: Scott Selikoff

The 8 Nights of Java – Night 3

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing The 8 Nights of Java series, tonight we focus on one of the most monumental, enormous, earth-shattering… no wait, we’re talking about Java 1.3 aren’t we? Java 1.3 has a number of important implementation and JRE changes but from a developer standpoint, very few new features. In retrospect, Java 1.3 was important as helping to make Java more stable and set up some of the hooks that later versions of Java would tie into, but in and of itself, was kind of a minor release.

Jump to: [Night 1 | Night 2 | Night 3 | Night 4 | Night 5 | Night 6 | Night 7 | Night 8]

Java 1.3 Notable Features
Sun brought in the new millennium with Java 1.3 (codename Kestrel), released on May 8, 2000. Key new functionality included:

  • JNDI
  • Hotspot JVM

From Scott:

I’ll be honest, there’s not much in Java 1.3 that find particularly interesting. Yes, JNDI is important but it’s not very exciting and wasn’t really relevant until J2EE servers started becoming commonplace years later. The Hotspot JVM was also important for production and deployment, but did not change how developers wrote code since the change was on the JRE side of things. In other words, Java 1.3 was a bit of a bore. Luckily the next few “nights” of Java more than make up for it!

My personal experience with Java 1.3 wasn’t completely uneventful, though. I took my first database applications course, CS433, back in college around this time. Our task was to design a database-driven web-based system. Because my school had been extremely heavy on theory, it was the first time we could really ‘cut loose’ and build something fun that people could use. We chose to build an toy auction website powered by Java 1.3, JSPs served by Tomcat, and an IBM DB2 SQL database. My two other teammates and I had so much fun in the course! For extra credit, we decided to integrate our search functionality into eBay, parsing their results and transforming them with XSLT so that our results and their results appeared side-by-side. It was a wonderful time and in hindsight, probably set the foundation for the rest of my Java career!

From Jeanne:

I was still in college when this was released. In fact, I had just started learning Java in 1999.. In summer 2001, I had my first paid job (internship) that used Java. (It was my second internship, but the first used C++.) My main task was using XSLT to generate webpages. I got a fast appreciation for JSPs from that job. Using XSLT added another level of abstraction and another way of thinking while trying to make web pages.

While there wasn’t anything new I cared about at the time, that was because I didn’t know enough. I’m thankful for it though. JNDI is really useful when writing code that runs on a server. I can’t imagine not being able to register a DataSource or JMS queue through JNDI. I imagine some other standard would have arisen to fill the gap if JNDI wasn’t invented.

The 8 Nights of Java – Night 1

Posted on by
1

Given the holiday season, we thought it would be fun to share our favorite (or least favorite) features from all 8 versions of Java that have been released to date. Some features, like generics and autoboxing/unboxing, were met with a lot of fanfare and have since changed the way we as developers write code. Others, like NIO.1 and RMI, are not nearly as popular today as originally envisioned. With that in mind, we’ll be posting one entry each night on a different version of Java, starting tonight with Java 1.

Oh, we want to wish all of our readers a Happy and Healthy Holiday, as well as a Wonderful New Year!

Jump to: [Night 1 | Night 2 | Night 3 | Night 4 | Night 5 | Night 6 | Night 7 | Night 8]

Java 1.0/1.1 Notable Features
Sun introduced Java 1.0 (codename Oak) on January 23, 1996, with a more stable Java 1.1 released in February of the following year. These versions included:

  • Compiler and JVM runtime environment
  • JDBC
  • The beginnings of reflection
  • Inner classes
  • Thread class

From Scott:

Java 1.0 released.. well, Java! We all take for granted the ability to execute Java code on nearly every platform but back when Java was first released the idea of compiling source code into byte code and running inside a virtual machine was absolutely revolutionary. It was one of the first languages to allow developers to work freely in any environment and deploy to any other environment. Before Java, programmers tended to use the same operating system, same IDE software, and same compiler to write software that often could only run on a handful of environments. Java helped foster the open source movement allowing developers to work in Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc and deploy to any system. At a time when hardware and software systems were much more heterogeneous than they are today, Java helped improve productivity and sharing across a wide variety of landscapes.

Of course, early on there were some problems. Microsoft released Visual J++ alongside Sun’s implementation which contained only a subset of Sun’s features, as well as additional features Microsoft wrote themselves. These differences almost splintered the Java landscape within the first few years, since Visual J++ was so different from Sun’s implementation. Luckily for us, Sun intervened, successfully suing Microsoft on the basis that it violated Sun’s license agreement by releasing a version of Java not compatible with other versions of Java, helping to solidify Java as a standards-based language. In hindsight, articles like “Microsoft’s J/Direct called death of Java” written in 1997 (and comical now) would be the first of many (including a famous interview with Steve Jobs) to incorrectly predict Java’s demise. Today, Java is used in over 3 billion devices worldwide.

My favorite part of Java 1.0? The fact that the Thread class was included right away. Multi-threaded programming was still somewhat new, especially since multi-core processors were still in their infancy. Providing a new language in which developers could process tasks in parallel was pretty forward thinking, even if our thread-base implementations weren’t always perfect. Today, we tend to rely on the Concurrency API given its feature-rich convenience and stability, but never forget it’s is built entirely upon the Thread class.

From Jeanne:

Version 1.0 included Vector. While we no longer use Vector for new code, it paved the way for ArrayList and the Collections framework. JDBC is one of my favorite libraries. I use a mix of raw JDBC, ORM and Spring JDBC template these days, but JDBC started all of this. And then we have the parts of the language that stood the test of time. Plus since Sun/Oracle find it hard to actually get rid of anything from the language, we also have such fond deprecated memories such as Date’s getHours() methods. I was still in high school when Java 1 launched. I never actually worked with it directly as Java 1.2 was out before I started even reading about Java. When Java turned 10, it was cool to read Hello World(s) – From Code to Culture and see how Java got started. Or should I say how Oak got started?

Announcing: Our NEW Java OCA / OCP 8 Practice Test Book!

Posted on by
1
pt-cover

Jeanne and I are thrilled and excited to announce that we are nearly done writing a brand new book for the OCA / OCP Java 8 Programmer exams!

The new book, OCA / OCP Java SE 8 Programmer Practice Tests, includes over 1000+ hand-crafted and peer reviewed questions. We’ve also created a new permanent Practice Tests OCA / OCP 8 book page on the blog to keep track of updates and news about the new book.

Jeanne and I wanted to say how thankful we are to our all of our readers of our first two books. Without your invaluable feedback and positive reviews, we never would have been offered this opportunity to expand our OCA and OCP subject matter. We promise to make this next book our best yet!

We are expecting to ship the book in March 2017. Stay tuned for additional news about the book!