Java Versions & Features

Visual summary of Java Features added since Java 9. Feature clusters show the focus areas over the years. 

• Initially (ver 9+) focus was on adding some scripting type features & stabilizing the big ticket features added previously.
• GC & Performance was in focus through the next several versions.
• Patterns with Switch, InstanceOf, Type, etc have comein since ver 11+.
• From 14+ Foreign Memory, Vector API, Unix Socket, etc various performant direct host I/O/ parallel computing features have made it in.
• Some syntactic additions like Module import, When clause, etc are part of the more recent releases.
  

References:

• Diagram's datasheet
• https://medium.com/@chandantechie/comprehensive-list-of-java-versions-with-key-features-and-upcoming-releases-54be35646cca
• https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/language/java-language-changes.html#GUID-6459681C-6881-45D8-B0DB-395D1BD6DB9B
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history
  
• https://www.marcobehler.com/guides/a-guide-to-java-versions-and-features#_java_features_8_20
• https://www.javatpoint.com/java-versions
• https://howtodoinjava.com/series/java-versions-features/

Pygradle for Python-3

Gradle, the build workhorse from the Java ecosystem, extends its support to Python through Pygradle. A recent attempt to build a Python-3.x project using Pygradle though did't work as expected. 

The delta between the supported Python-2.x vs Python-3.x is hard to reconcile with many issues like:

• Need for a specific, old version of Java (ver.8), Gradle (ver. 5.0), etc
• Dependencies on old versions of Python modules without backwards compatibility
• Hard to figure out which exact version will work
• A rule of thumb is to pick the highest version dependency module around some cut-off year like 2018/19, post which they don't seem to build
• Downloading of the correct dependencies & creating ivy files
• Includes identifying the right version, name, dependencies-within-dependencies (that no longer work on Python-3.x), etc.
• Using a local file system based repo to download & build modules & ivy files
  

With some effort though, have been able to complete a successful build on a Python-3.8 on an Ubuntu-20.04 with Java-8 & Gradle-5.0. More details are available on the pygradle_python3_example repo. Hope this helps!

To Mock a Cloud

Cloud hosting has been the norm for a while now. Saas, Paas, Iaas, serverless, AI whatever the form may be, organizations (org) need to have a digital presence on the cloud. 

Cloud vendors offer hundreds of features and services such as 24x7 availability, fail-safe, load-balanced, auto-scaling, disaster resilient distributed, edge-compute, AI/ Ml clusters, LLMs, Search, Database, Datawarehouses among many others right off-the-shelf. They additionally provide a pay-as-you-go model only for the services being used. Essentially everything that any org could ask for today & in the future!

But it's not all rosy. The cloud bill (even though pay-as-you-go) does burn a hole in the pockets. While expenses for the live production (prod) environment is necessary, costs for the other dev, test, etc, internal environments could be largely reduced by replacing the real Cloud with a Mock Cloud. This would additionally, speed up dev and deployment times and make bug fixes and devops much quicker & streamlined.

As dev's know mocks, emulators, etc are only as good as their implementation - how true they are to the real thing. It's a pain to find new/ unknown bugs on the prod only because it's an env very different from dev/ test. Which dev worth his weight in salt (or gold!) hasn't seen this ever?

While using containers to mock up cloud services was the traditional way of doing it, a couple of recent initiatives like Localstack, Moto, etc seem promising. Though AWS focussed for now, support for others are likely soon. Various AWS services like s3, sns, sqs, ses, lambda, etc are already supported at different levels of maturity. So go explore mocks for cloud & happy coding!