Yesterday, we announced new second-generation runtimes for Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3. In addition, App Engine standard instances now run with double the memory. Today, we’re happy to announce the availability of the new Java 11 second-generation runtime for App Engine standard in beta. Now, you can take advantage of the latest Long-Term-Support version of the Java programming language to develop and deploy your applications on our fully-managed serverless application platform.

Based on technology from the gVisor container sandbox, second-generation runtimes let you write portable web apps and microservices that take advantage of App Engine’s unique auto-scaling, built-in security and pay-per-use billing model—without some of App Engine’s earlier runtime restrictions. Second generation-runtimes also let you build applications more idiomatically. You’re free to use whichever framework or library you need for your project—there are no limitations in terms of what classes you can use, for instance. You can even use native dependencies if needed. Beyond Java, you can also use alternative JVM (Java Virtual Machine) languages like Apache Groovy, Kotlin or Scala if you wish.

Last week at the Google Cloud Next conference, I had the chance to speak about the Java developer’s journey through the “serverless” offering of Google Cloud Platform, with my colleague Vinod Ramachandran (Product Manager on some of our serverless products):

Serverless Java in 2019 is going to be ubiquitous in your favorite cloud. Well, it’s actually been 10 years since you could take advantage of Java on Google App Engine. But now you can run your apps on the brand-new Java 11 runtime. Not only servlet-based apps but also executable JARs. And what about authoring functions? Until now, you could only use Node or Python, but today, Java is the third runtime available for Google Cloud Functions. We will review the various ways you can develop your Java functions. Last but not least, thanks to serverless containers, containerized Java workloads run serverlessly, without you caring for infrastructure, scaling, or paying for idle machines. Through various demos, we will look at the many ways Java developers will be able to write, build, test, and deploy code in Java on the rich serverless offering of Google Cloud Platform.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to be at Devoxx Belgium once again, to meet developers and learn about new things from awesome speakers. Google Cloud Platform had its own booth on the exhibition floor, and the team was running codelabs: 10 laptops were at the disposal of attendees to go through various hands-on tutorials on several GCP products. I took a chance at crafting my own codelab: deploying a Micronaut application, containerized with Jib, to Google Kubernetes Engine.

Just before heading to Google Cloud Next, I was notified I was listed 4th in JAX London’s Top 20 Java influencers of 2018 on social media! It’s an honor to be listed among famous figures like Josh Bloch, Brian Goetze, Martin Thompson, Arun Gupta, Jessica Kerr, Mario Fusco, Josh Long, Venkat Subramanian, Charles Nutter and many others. You can see the full list of the top influencers here.

I’ll definitely continue to advocate for Java (and Apache Groovy) developers around the world, and share whatever I learn along the way through articles or conference talks. I’m looking forward to meeting you, my fellow Java/Groovy developer friends, at an event near you.

The Java Champions recently nominated me to become a Java Champion!

Please welcome the new Java Champions. @antoine_sd @javajudd @glaforge @kenkousen @kito99 @vlad_mihalcea@leomrlima @net0pyr @shelajev @rgransberger @rmehmandarov  @Sander_Mak @SeanMiPhillips Well done to all of you @OracleDevs @java #odevcommunity pic.twitter.com/X9yeek641s

— Java Champions (@Java_Champions) November 22, 2017

There’s also a post on the Java Champions’ blog, and InfoQ also echoed the new nominees recently.

I’m super happy and proud of this nomination, and I’m looking forward to continuing being involved in the Java ecosystem, present at Java-friendly conferences, contribute to Open Source projects using Java and Apache Groovy, and write articles here and there using my favorite languages.

In my timeline, I saw a tweet from Joe Walnes about the built-in HTTP server available in the JDK since Java 6. It’s super convenient, starts super fast, easy to use, but I often forget about it. I’d probably not use it for serving planet-wide load, but it’s very useful when you need to create a quick service, a little mock for testing some web or micro-service.

Here’s a little hello world for the fun.

Last week, I was in San Francisco for my tenth JavaOne! I had two sessions: one on the past / present / future of Java Platform-as-a-Service offerings, and one on programming language influences, and particularly how was Apache Groovy influenced, and how it also inspired other languages.

Here’s the abstract:

Languages have been influencing one another since the dawn of computer programming. There are families of languages: from Algol descendants with begin/end code blocks to those with curly braces such as C. Languages are not invented in a vacuum but are inspired by their predecessors. This session’s speaker, who has been working on Apache Groovy for the past 14 years, reflects on the influences that have driven the design of programming languages. In particular, Groovy’s base syntax was directly derived from Java’s but quickly developed its own flavor, adding closures, type inference, and operators from Ruby. Groovy also inspired other languages: C#, Swift, and JavaScript adopted Groovy’s null-safe navigation operator and the famous Elvis operator.

Read more...

I’ll be back at JavaOne in San Francisco in October to speak about Apache Groovy and Google App Engine.

Apache Groovy

I’ve been involved with the Apache Groovy project for 14 years now, it’s a long time, and it’s interesting to see how the language has evolved over time, how it was influenced by other languages, but also how it influenced those other languages itself! Let’s see which operators or syntax constructs evolved and moved from one to the other.

Apache Groovy is coming up with a new parser, that supports the Java 8 syntax elements, as well as some new notation and operators of its own (like !in, !instanceof or ?[] for safe navigation with collections, or with ?= for Elvis assignment). I blogged recently about the fact that you can try this new flavor online on this forked Groovy Web Console version, without the need of installing everything. But today I’ll tell you how to build it for yourself in order to run it on your machine.

In two weeks, I’ll be flying east, much further east than I’ve ever been! I’ll visit Singapore! And I’ll have a pretty busy week with several events: conference, meetup, user groups, brown bag lunch… and I’ll talk about Groovy, Machine Learning, and chatbots!

First of all, on Wednesday 31st, I’ll participate to the Singapore Java User Group, where I’ll give an update on Apache Groovy (the latest improvements, new features, the roadmap).