“Java does not permit multiple implementation inheritance, but the problem is not gone,” explains Venkat Subramaniam. In his session, you will learn about solutions in Java 8 and previous versions. The presentation also explores the options available in Scala and Groovy.

Welcome the new Java Champion Mario Fusco!

Mario Fusco is a senior software engineer at Red Hat working on Drools, the JBoss rule engine. He has years of experience as Java developer working on enterprise projects in industries ranging from media to the financial sectors.

He is passionate about functional programming and Domain Specific Languages and developed the open source library lambdaj which provides an internal Java DSL for manipulating collections and introduced functional programming in Java before the introduction of lambdas. 

Mario is a frequent speaker at major Java conferences such JavaOne, Devoxx, LambdaWorld, and Voxxed. He authored a number of articles about parallel programming on InfoQ and Dzone websites. He is the co-author of Java 8 in Action published by Manning. Follow him on Twitter @mariofusco

The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Learn more about Java Champions

In this JavaOne session, Reza Rahman gives an overview of Java EE 7 features, and guides you through a tutorial of an open source project called Cargo Tracker. The Cargo Tracker application tracks shipping containers going through different ports. The application is good example of an applied domain driven design blueprint using Java EE. Watch additional JavaOne sessions online!

Father of Java is now Liquid Robotics' chief software architect

I learned James Gosling, the creator of the Java language, is now the admiral of a fleet of water-borne drones from Mike Duigou last Thursday at the Java Hub in the JavaOne Exhibit hall. Gosling is the chief software architect for Sunnyvale-based Liquid Robotics, a 8-year-old company that uses self-propelled 7-foot-long marine robotic drones that look like surfboards to collect and transmit oceanic data for a variety of uses. Duigou told me that he was brought aboard by Gosling as Senior Software Engineer when he joined the company in 2011.

Called Wave Gliders, the drone are powered by wave energy, with the constant up-and-down motion providing energy that pulls the robots through the ocean. Duigou gave me a hand-on tour of the USS Gosling, a test Wave Glider on display in the Hub. He explained the Wave Glider is made of two parts: the surfboard-sized float that stays on the surface; and the sub that has wings and hangs 3-9 meters below the float on an umbilical tether. Because of the separation, the float experiences more wave motion than the sub. This difference allows wave energy to be harvested to for propulsion.

Exploded view of Wave Glider marine drone (source: Liquid Rocket)

The Wave Glider is equipped with several computers for navigation and payload control, satellite communication systems, and ocean sensors that do things like measure weather, sea conditions, water quality and chemistry, animal life and water currents. Acoustic microphones and arrays on the Wave Glider have also been use to record passing ships and the vocalizations of whales and other mammals (an early use case of the company's technology).

The power needed to operate the sensors and computers is provided by solar panels, which are used to recharge lithium-ion batteries. Individual Wave Glider can be programmed for autonomous operation, or it can be steered by a remote pilot over the Internet. Continuous, near real time, communication is provided via satellite, cellular phone or radio links for piloting and data transmission.

All the Wave Glider computing power is Linux- and Java-based and includes a Hadoop cluster on the backend used to analyze the large data sets the devices collect, either individually or in groups. Duigou explained that the Wave Gliders can also be programmed to operate as a drone swarm. "For example, you can set up a fence around a marine protected area like Monterey Bay and give them all the goal of defending the border and reporting intruders. The robots can figure out who goes where."

A diver swims with a Wave Glider SV2 during operations in Hawaii (source: Liquid Rocket).

Find out more about Liquid Robotics here: http://liquidr.com/index.html

Controlling a 3D Printer with Java and VRL-Studio

I chatted with Java Rockstar Michael Hoffer on Tuesday at the Java Hub in the Exhibit hall about VRL-Studio, an innovative visual programming environment he created in Java that combines visual and text-based programming. Currently doing his PhD at the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, Hoffer works at the Goethe-Center for Scientific Computing in Frankfurt. His research interests are in developing visual programming concepts in the field of modeling and simulation of highly complex physical processes including those modeled by medical scanning equipment.

VRL-Studio uses the Java Reflection API and Groovy to automatically generate interactive user interfaces, and has a powerful plug-in system that allows for easy integration of Java libraries, such as the 3-D modeling library JCSG. Hoffer demonstrated how he created a lightweight drone with four arms that are modeled on a complex structure found in the bones of birds. (see images below) "These drone parts can also be optimized to remove vibration. This structure cannot be created via milling, but it's a very easy task for a 3D printer."

It's also easy it is to turn a Raspberry PI board into a fully functional robot, Hoffer said, using 3D geometries created with the open source JCSG library and his VRL-Studio IDE. He then demonstrated his 'Pi on Wheels' bot, an affordable open source Do-It-Yourself robot, which he uses to teach Java-related technologies in the context of the Internet of Things.

Hoffer blogs about Java, JavaFX, and related technologies at http://mihosoft.eu/ Find out more at VRL-Studio here: http://vrl-studio.mihosoft.eu/

Lightweight drone with four arms modeled on a complex structure found in the bones of birds

Close up picture of drone arm printed by 3D printer.

'Pi on Wheels' bot, with 3D printed body and wheels

Humaoid Robots Are Big in Japan

I spent part of this afternoon at the MakerZone, which is part of the Java Hub at this year's JavaOne Exhibit Hall, where I had a brief, enjoyable chat with Pepper, a 4-foot tall humanoid robot. Created by Aldebaran Robotics, Pepper is a social robot able to recognize and react to human emotions and carry on simple conversations in as many as 28 different languages. (I met and wrote about Nao, Pepper’s androgynous older sibling, in a recent JavaOne4kids workshop that showed how Nao could be taught to walk, talk, catch small objects and even dance). Besides being almost twice as tall as Nao, Pepper moves around on three omnidirectional wheels rather than feet like Nao. The Nao robot has been in development since 2006, while Pepper only has been around for a little over a year. Pepper’s added wheels give him greater range and almost 14 hours of battery life, which is three times the amount Nao has. The additional battery life was a requirement, said Nicholas Rigaud, Developer Community Leader for Aldebaran, since he was designed to greet and interact with customers in retail stores owned by Japanese mobile phone operator SoftBank Mobile, Aldebaran’s parent company.

Aldebaran has participated in three JavaOne conferences and keeps coming back each year because it's a great way to engage with a global community of software developers. "There is a great deal of entrepreneurial energy at these shows, which is what we're looking for," Rigaud said. "We want to get the word out about the programming resources and simulation tools we have to help developers create, fine tune and monetize their applications on the Aldebaran robotic platform." These resources include Choregraphe (the company's graphical drag and drop programming interface) that lets developers create applications with sample code containing dialog and behavior for the robots. The development environment includes a SDK simulator so that programmers can view their apps on a virtual 3D robot. Rigaud said there are currently 4,000 developers actively participating in the free developer program, of which roughly 25% are robot owners. 104 countries are represented, including 2,400 developers in Japan, 350 in the US and 300 in France. Find out more about Aldebaran's global developer program here: https://community.aldebaran.com/en/developerprogram

JavaOne 2015 Keynote Focuses on Future Java Platforms

The half-dozen presentations in the opening JavaOne keynote featured a few looks in the rearview mirror to honor Java's 20-year rise to become the dominate general-purpose computer programming language, but otherwise it was a pedal to the metal focus on new features in the various Java ME, Java SE and Java EE platforms. A familiar face from Java's past also made a brief and humorous video appearance to cap an eventful 2-hour session on Sunday, October 25, 2015 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Host Georges Saab (VP Java Platform Development at Oracle) welcomed Michael Greene (VP Software and Service Group at Intel) who discussed Intel's history with Java. "Two important things happened in 1995," Green said, "I married my wife of 20 years and Intel acquired its first Java source license. I was one of the first Intel engineers dedicated to insuring Java works best on Intel hardware and that transformed my career. Twenty years later, I'm glad to say we haven't missed a beat."

The bulk of Green's presentation covered what Intel has done since joining the OpenJDK community in 2014 to promote open source implementations of Java. He announced that the Intel IoT Developer Kit now supports Java, which will make it easier for Java developers to address sensors, stream data and work with data on the web, He also said that Intel's Quark, a new embedded low-power processor designed for small mobile devices like wearable computers, will now run Java ME.

Mark Reinhold (Chief Architect, Java Platform Group) took the stage to discuss features in the next Java 9 SE release, now scheduled for 2016. He explained that Java has evolved over the years by tackling pain point that Java developers complain about through the Java Community Process. "In Java 5, we introduced generics; in Java 8, we introduced lambdas, and in Java 9, we'll be introducing modularity to create a scalable and more secure platform." Reinhold explained that modularity is intended to ease the pain of constructing, maintaining and distributing large applications by removing the "JAR hell" developers currently experience when trying to install software packages that have dependencies on specific versions of other software packages. He noted that 'JAR hell' is such a common developer complaint that it has its own Wikipedia page to describe all the various ways in which the classloading process can end up not working. Modularity will not have the same impact on the average developer as lambdas have had in Java SE 8, Reinhold said. "Modules are more like seat belts than lambda expression jet packs."

Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, then talked about what's in store for future Java SE releases beyond Java 9. Project Valhalla will add value types, which are highly-efficient small 'objects' that do not have an inheritance property, and Project Panama builds a bridge between Java and C/C++ by providing a native interconnect between code managed by the JVM and APIs for non-Java /C++ libraries. Both of these projects are intended to provide more efficient access to data and better control over data layout in memory to achieve higher performance.

Engineering VP Anil Gaur next gave an update on Java EE release 8, which is expected in the first half of 2017. Gaur said that, based on a survey that received over 4,500 responses, the Java EE community has prioritized the desired features for the next Java EE platform release, which includes new APIs for JSON Processing, RESTful Web Services and Java EE Security, among other features.

The keynote ended with a surprise video that featured former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, who talked about how Sun developed the Java language. "I hired James Gosling in the early 1990s because Bill Joy said he was the best programmer he knew. I took his advice because Bill was the best programmer I knew. After a while, James got bored and threatened to quit. I told him I would give him the resources to do anything he wanted, as long as he didn't quit. What he wanted to do is develop a "write once, run anywhere" language. Which he did, and which is why we all now have the Java language."

McNealy concluded his short video with the following "top 12 list of Java Developer nightmares of 2015":

#12. Screenglare
#11. Entry level developers are now in the top income bracket
#10. Product marketing specs, customer deadlines and style guides
# 9. Your peer programming partner starts at 7am, with bad breath
# 8. You've got a great seat on the commuter bus, but the wifi is broken
#7. Larry raised the price of coffee
# 6. James Gosling is working at Liquid Rocket, not at Oracle
# 5. No ping pong balls and no beer
# 4. You love open source software and sharing, but you work at Oracle
# 3. Bay area traffic, California taxes, no rain and marijuana is illegal
# 2. You love your company chef, but he is on a 2-week maternity leave
# 1. The former CEO and current CTO is making ship to shore calls to you on a regular basis."

In this interview, Michael Hoffer lets you discover the world of 3D modeling and printing. But what has 3D printing to do with Java? Michael is the one who bridged that gap by creating the Java Constructive Solid Geometry(JCSG), an open source and free tool to model 3D printable objects. If you join us at JavaOne, you can make your own model and then print it. You will also discover the robots that Michael created with 3D printed parts. He will be onsite answering questions. All this is at the Java Hub.

Another cool demo this year at JavaOne is Mark Heckler’s autonomous drone. He describes here how to create an autonomous drone with affordable technologies and open source libraries. He used Java embedded, the cheap credit card size Raspberry Pi for his self flying drones. If you are at JavaOne, you will have the chance to meet him at the Java Hub.