The results of this past week's poll demonstrate varying views among the Java developer community on Java's current support for parallel programming, and the need for additional support (for example, through the addition of closures). A total of 256 votes were cast in the poll. Here is the exact question and the results:
Is Java's parallel programming support sufficient to meet 'the Multicore Challenge'?
34% (86 votes) - Yes, Java's existing thread libraries, etc., meet the need
18% (45 votes) - No, but support for closures in Java 7 will meet the need
20% (52 votes) - No
14% (36 votes) - What's 'the Multicore Challenge'?
14% (37 votes) - I don't know; other
The first thing I notice is the relatively small number of respondants who believe the addition of closures to Java will have a significant impact on Java's parallel programming support. In Mark Reinhold's Closures for Java post, he cites the necessity to write scalable parallel programs as the primary reason why it's critical that closures be added to Java now. Yet, only 18% of the voters in our non-scientific survey believe that adding closures to Java will make Java sufficiently capable with respect to parallel programming.
Meanwhile, all of the other response options received a considerable share of the vote. The range between the option with the highest and lowest share of the vote was only 20%. That hasn't happened too often in java.net polls.
34% of voters believe the parallel programming support Java currently offers is sufficient to meet today's and future needs. 20% believe that even with the addition of closures to Java, its parallel programming support will still be inadequate going into the future.
Then, there are the 14% who wondered what 'the Multicore Challenge' is. This isn't surprising, because, through today, very few developers have had to develop multithreaded software. And prior to the breakdown of Moore's Law with respect to single core processors, it has been historically the case that for most applications there was no need to develop multithreaded code: the application got faster because the speed of individual processor cores kept increasing rapidly over time.
Speaking of Moore's Law and its possible breakdown, here's an interesting article I just found on a possibility whereby there may be New life for Moore's Law. The article was written in 2005, and I'm not sure what's happened to the technology it discusses since then. But, if a way was found to keep the Moore's Law template chugging along on single processor cores, then the "Multicore Challenge" would be postponed at least for a while, obviating the need for developers to learn how to write threadsafe code, and the need for Java itself to include robust and not-too-difficult-to-implement parallel programming support.
Getting back to the poll, another 14% answered "I don't know; other." There were no comments posted, so this 14% may consist mostly of people who simply haven't given the need for parallel programming in Java much thought, or they haven't had to do it yet and know they don't know enough of the details of Java's current support to select one of the other options. Again, the size of this group is not surprising.
All in all, in spite of the fervent discussion that has proceeded from Mark Reinhold's announcement at DEVOXX that Java 7 will include a limited form of closures, the results of our poll don't suggest that developers see a strong need for closures in Java as a means of addressing parallel programming deficiences in the language. That's an interesting result, one that's at considerable variance from Mark Reinhold's view.
New poll: is DEVOXX now the premiere Java conference?
The recent DEVOXX conference was the venue for one of the bigger Java announcements of 2009 (that closures will be included in Java 7). According to Andrew Phillips, the DEVOXX content "seems to be more or less on a par with JavaOne". Clearly, there is some doubt about whether there will be another JavaOne. If not, perhaps there will be a new section of Oracle Open World devoted to Java -- but what would be the "look and feel" of something like that?
So, this week's new java.net poll asks: "Is DEVOXX now the premiere Java conference?" Voting will run through next Thursday or early Friday.
I love it when Sun employees like Richard Bair and Jasper Potts demonstrate features, and show code samples (in wet concrete of course), for upcoming JavaFX releases. In this post I'd like to bring some of these Sun-leaked features and code samples to light. Please note that this talk was a preview, and things will of course change before the final JavaFX 1.3 release...
Jersey is the JAX-RS Reference Implementation but also is fully production quality component of GlassFish v3, and includes many features (Jersey@TA) to expand its usefulness. Paul just reported on two recent additions...
Software developers writing applications for Google Android are struggling to turn a profit from the mobile operating system. New research published on Tuesday by positioning system firm Skyhook Wireless found that 57% of mobile application developers were not satisfied with their profits from Android. Only 4% of the respondents reported being very satisfied. "Rather than creating opportunity, platform divergence has just created further problems; we simply can't afford to test across all Android phones," said Android app maker James Grafton, in a statement.
This is Houston... Just cleared out my iTouch of Tweets from the DEVOXX09 conference....Man! were there a lot of Tweets... Here's a list of the one's I've "starred"... Ack! there were hundreds more...
This Pet Catalog app explains a web application that
uses Wicket, JPA, GlassFish and MySQL. I took this example JSF 2.0, JPA, GlassFish and MySQL
and modified it to use Wicket instead of JSF...
forceTen
has been born as the container of components for rendering geographic
views and representing the related modes for the geotagging
capabilities of blueMarine;
but it has been also reused in two more server-side projects, where a
special focus has been given to the models. The most trivial feature is the capability of managing accurate geo
tags: for instance, no duplicates and no erroneous spelling when
entering the name of a place. These features imply the need to keep a
hierarchical structure of names, in order to disambiguate places that
might have the same name, but are in different provinces or countries...
In the Forums, aloleary wonders if it's possible to Lock layer without busy icon ?: "Hello, i would simply like to lock a panel - but i dont want the busy mouse effect... is this possible ? Thanks in advance -A"
syc17 has a question regarding Metro 1.5 + STS issued token with SAML2.0 attribute statements: "Hi. I've implemented my own STSAttributeProvider to write SAML2 assertions in my STS issued tokens. However, I have some questions on how to customise the attribute statements:1) is there a way to set the Attribute's FriendlyName (which..."
And dmaroto83 needs the Number of vertex the renderer is working with: "Hi, Only one question: Does anybody know how to obtain the number of vertex that the renderer is showing every moment? It`s important to me, because I want to make a comparative study between "frames per second" and "vertex", and wonderland..."
In our current Spotlight, Sebastien Arbogast talks about My Devoxx Discoveries of the Year
: "Every year, the main reason why I go to Devoxx is to discover new stuff. For me it’s all about technology watch. The internet and RSS feeds are my main tech watch instrument but there is one thing that is harder to get through RSS: feelings. Conferences like Devoxx are a unique opportunity, not only to see what’s happening but also to sense how the community is feeling about it, which is at least as important to anticipate on what’s going to be important..."
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