Java Standard Edition 7 Finally Released by Oracle

Oracle has finally shipped Java Platform Standard Edition 7, otherwise known as Java SE 7, in what is the first major update to the programming language in over five years. Oracle let news of this out in a company announcement yesterday. This is also the very first release of Java SE under the ownership of Oracle.

According to Oracle Chief Java Programming Architect Mark Reinhold in a webcast earlier in the month, "We all know for various business and political reasons that this release has taken some time."

According to an estimate by Oracle, some 9 million developers from around the globe use Java. Tiobe Software also estimates that Java is the most widely used programming language in the world, bumping off C and obliterating C++ with twice as many users. Over 3 billion devices around the world run Java and it is deployed by 97% of enterprise desktops worldwide. In addition to that, the Java runtime is downloaded over a billion times each year.

Since Oracle acquired Java as part of its January 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the company has come under a lot of scrutiny from a plethora of different quarters for its management. Back in December, the Apache Software Foundation withdrew its participation from the Java Community Process, stating that Oracle did not govern Java as a truly open specification. Oracle has also sued Google for "inappropriate use of Java" in Google's Android mobile OS.

According to Senior Director of Engineering for Red Hat's Middleware Business and Red Hat's Primary Liaison for the JCP Mark Little, however, "The new release is solid, though it is more of an incremental release than anything else."

The new version of Java addresses many of the trends that have overtaken the field of computer programming over the past 10 years. It offers increasingly improved support for the growing number of non-Java dynamic languages that are web design to run on Java Virtual Machine. In addition to that, it also features an API for simplifying the task of running a program across multiple processor cores. Also, the range of actions that programs can take with file systems has been vastly improved as well.

Source: Computer World - Oracle releases Java SE 7

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4:03 AM | 0 komentar

Google Discontinuing Toolbar Support for Mozilla Firefox

Things between Firefox and Google have taken a turn for the awkward. Since its inception, Mozilla has always received a lot of funding from the search giant. However, analysts have been expecting Google to drop out of that role ever since the company launched its very own web browser, Google Chrome. Ever since Chrome was released and those analysts made their predictions, they have all been sorely disappointed, until now.

Google has just announced that the company will no longer include support for new versions of Firefox with its Google Toolbar. Many analysts' predictions have finally come true though this may spark another prediction, one that announcse that a new browser war has just been started.

However, that seems highly unlikely. The main reason Google is dropping support is due to the fact that Firefox already offers a lot of the benefits that the Google Toolbar offers, whether it be natively or through the immense amount of add-ons that Firefox offers.

Google is being very courteous about the dropping of support. The company will continue to offer Google Toolbar for older versions of Firefox and even created a webpage that was designed to help former users of Google Toolbar find similar functions in Firefox 5 and later versions yet to come. The Google Toolbar Blog has the full announcement if you are interested.

What do you think? Are you upset about Google dropping Google Toolbar support on later versions of Firefox? Or does the browser have enough of its own features to fill the gap? If you really can't live without the Google Toolbar, you can always switch to Google Chrome. It works well enough for me to work on every day.

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Source: MaximumPC - Google Dumps Toolbar Support For Firefox

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4:37 AM | 0 komentar