New Book Review: "Java: The Legend"
New book review for Java: The Legend – Past, Present, and Future, by Ben Evans, O'Reilly, 2015:
As the publicity material for this short, 50-page programming report points out, the road from Java's first public 1.0 alpha back in 1995 to its present form has been long, full of technical advances, innovative solutions, and interesting complications. Java has flourished along the way, however, and is now one of the world's most important and widely-used programming environments. Going further, the author comments toward the end of the text that "for serious, safe application development, Java is pretty close to being the only game in town". Leading up to this statement, Evans discusses the Java language, the Java Virtual Machine and Platform, Java developers and the ecosystem, and both the history and future of Java.
The content that the author provides here is probably the most concisely written essay I have ever read about Java. Earlier this year, I was asked to present to a client President the differences between Java and its Microsoft counterpart, and had this text been available it would have provided some additional considerations with regard to Java itself, as Evans focuses only on Java here, noting briefly that "only Microsoft's .NET framework has offered any serious competition to Java for enterprise development". In some limited respects, portions of this book are a bit of a counterpart to Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts", in the sense that it discusses the good and the bad, but the content that the author presents is very light on code.
Adopting the OpenJDK (as opposed to the Oracle JDK) for a client project for the first time myself just recently, the "History of Open-Source Java" in the first chapter of this book was the content which initially grabbed my attention, especially because of the diagram on the OpenJDK branching process. And in the fifth, last chapter of this book, the author summarizes the next major release, Java 9, scheduled for September 2016. While Java 8 provided lambda expressions, Java 9 is expected to bring the module grouping construct along with a new file format. In addition, Oracle has proposed that the default garbage collector be changed, a new Java API for HTTP/2 is being considered to replace the legacy API from 1999, and a Java REPL was started via Project Kulla. Good read provided free by O'Reilly.