Presentation: Java 11 - Keeping the Java Release Train on the Right Track

I work for a large bank in New York City on the DevOps team, and we're automating the pipeline to enable continuous deployments to production. We've been doing automation for a lot of years. My team does a lot of coding and mentoring of others. It's amazing how much automation there is in order to get something to work for a lot of teams including reporting, security and load testing. We do a lot of Selenium. It's fun to write the code because it's not just another webapp screen, it's something that's unique and different most of the time. There are opportunities to play with things that are new and code. There are a lot of heavy threads and a lot of heavy connectivity testing, which is a lot of fun. Also, the automation programming is nice because each piece is fairly small, something to get out of the door really quickly and see it in production right away.

Java 11 is new, very new, I was looking for something that people need to have an awareness of, and Java 11 is a sweet spot for that because in New York City a lot of big companies, such as financial institutions, have been holding back on using Java 11 because Java 9 and 10 don't have long term support. Which means that Java 11 is the next one that a lot of people are going to upgrade. Java 9 got a lot of exposure, everyone knows what Jigsaw is, but Java 10 got almost no exposure in New York. I suspect Java 11 is going to have a similar problem. This is a way of letting people know what's this about, catching them up with Java 10, getting them ready for Java 11, and be ready and excited for it in late September when it actually comes out.

Java 11 has a number of new features. Some of them are of the cool variety, you can use Unicode to draw a pretzel, which has limited applications. There are other things like the garbage collector and the HTTP client interface becoming standardized. There are also other features in Java 10 that are pretty neat, and I want to make sure everyone knows about those and expose them to it more as well.

Some really cool things in Java 10 are the new garbage collector, the fact that we have var, it saves a lot of typing and surprisingly makes code easier to read, and in Java 11 it will have an impact on lambdas as well. I think versioning is one of the coolest parts.

The most important thing I want them to leave with is knowing that Java 11 is different than just another Java upgrade. Why that is, how to explain it to their manager, and be excited about the coding changes.