OpenJDK Evolutions plus Tips and Tricks (#83)

Welcome to another episode of the Foojay Podcast! Just like in the previous episode, I bring you conversations from two of Europe's premier Java conferences - Devoxx in Belgium and JFall in the Netherlands.

At these conferences, I had the opportunity to speak with members of the Java community about topics ranging from the evolution of Java itself to mobile development, performance optimization, and even automotive security.

My first guest is Johan Vos, a Java Champion who takes us on a journey through Java's history - from porting Java to Linux in 1995 to his current work on bringing Java and JavaFX to mobile and embedded devices through the Java On Mobile project.

Then we'll hear from Stephen Chin, author of "The Definitive Guide to Modern Java Clients with JavaFX," who shares insights on building cross-platform client applications and reflects on how his daughter has followed in his footsteps to become a published author and technology educator.

From JFall, Joseph Phillips joins us to discuss Java's evolution, the differences between REST and gRPC, and whether virtual threads have replaced the need for async implementations in modern Java applications.

Next, François Martin walks us through the world of Java performance benchmarking with JMH - the Java Microbenchmark Harness - and explains why it's so valuable for comparing different implementations and optimizing code.

Wouter De Geus shares his inspiring journey from finance and mathematics into Java development, and how his employer, the Dutch Tax Authority, supports open-source contributions and the Java community.

And finally, Roald Nefs demonstrates something truly unique - using Java and the Foreign Function & Memory API to hack into automotive systems, revealing important security considerations for both hardware and software.

Content

00:00 Introduction of topics and guests

02:11 Johan Vos

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/johanvos/
• History of Java on Linux
• How the Java language and runtime are stable and evolving at the same time
• Looking at the future of Write-Once-Run-Everywhere with Java(FX) on Mobile
• https://openjdk-mobile.github.io/

19:04 Stephen Chin

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveonjava/
• Author of "The Definitive Guide to Modern Java Clients with JavaFX"
• Cassandra Chin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-chin-developer/
• Her book: https://www.amazon.nl/Raising-Young-Coders-Teaching-Programming/dp/B0DVBQZ483

23:22 Joseph Phillips

• https://foojay.social/deck/@infosec812
• Java evolutions, community
• REST versus gRPC
• Do we still need async or are virtual threads a better solution?

27:49 François Martin

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/fran%C3%A7oismartin
• Java performance micro benchmarks with jmh
• https://github.com/openjdk/jmh

33:30 Wouter De Geus

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/wadegeus/
• Moved from finance to software development
• Contributing back to the open-source community

39:33 Roald Nefs

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/roaldnefs/
• Hacking cars with the FFM API
• Hardware and software security concerns
• What you can learn from the Java community

46:29 Outro