There’s been a lot of change in the Java community in the last year. The fact that the world’s most popular programming language and #1 developer choice for the cloud is moving faster than ever should be cause for celebration, but change always creates concerns. By helping to clear away some of those concerns, Java expert Jeanne Boyarsky has found opportunity—including speaking at Oracle Code One, which is in San Francisco October 22 to 25.
Java expert Jeanne Boyarsky will fight FUD with facts at Oracle Code One.
OracleOne big point of change is the six-month release cycle, which started with the March release. Now, the announcement of total feature parity between OpenJDK (Java Developer Kit) and the OracleJDK has, surprisingly, not been received with universal positivity. Such skepticism is natural but not necessarily warranted, says Boyarsky, who wrote Sybex’s Java 8 OCA and OCP certification books and is a developer with Code Ranch, as well as a high school robotics team volunteer and a distinguished toastmaster, among other enthusiasms.
“There has been a lot of change in the last year and people seem to have different parts of the facts but a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt based on things that aren’t actual problems,” she says. Boyarsky will look to conquer FUD with facts in a talk entitled “Which Java Version from Which Vendor with What Support?” [DEV5125] presented with Martijn Verburg, CEO of JClarity. “We are going to be covering what is fact and what people need to do to plan both for the Oracle JDK and the other JDKs that are out there.”
One question some developers have is how often to update a JDK that changes every six months, and what kind of support developers can expect for code in production. Boyarsky, who works for a bank in New York City, breaks it down: “It’s really a three-year release cycle. Everyone knows when the next long-term support (LTS) is coming out, just like we prepare for the quarterly security updates. I don’t deal with a lot of people who are upgrading every six months.”
Boyarsky is one of 500-plus speakers at Oracle Code One, the developer event that was formerly JavaOne. The conference has expanded to include more languages, technologies, and developer communities, while keeping all its strong Java technical content developers have come to expect.
Scripting for More Secure Java Code
Because she works on a DevSecOps team, Boyarsky thinks a lot about process automation across enterprises with many teams. In her talk, and related hands-on lab, also at Code One, Boyarsky has devised a fun scenario to demonstrate how teams (meet the Secret Sea Lions vs. The Open Ospreys) using scripting with Groovy, Nexus, and Jenkins can automate environments and secure their code in a scalable fashion.
For Boyarsky, speaking at Oracle’s developer conference was a major career goal, and she pulled it off with aplomb last year (one of her talks involved “finding mutants”—mutant code, that is. “Now I have a T-shirt that says JavaOne—but that only matters for sentimental value.” Now that JavaOne has been renamed Oracle Code One, she views the evolution with equanimity. “Nobody does just Java,” she says. “You’re part of the stack, you do front-end, DevOps, Groovy, Scala.… I think people were worried that Code One was being absorbed into Oracle OpenWorld. But I feel like it’s a nice, cohesive developer conference.”
