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Java 8 is scheduled for full release next March. The big item in Java 8 is the support for the new Lambdas syntax - I advise you to look up some tutorials into Lambdas because they're going to become a core part of a Java programmer's armoury. It's not that Lambdas provide anything that you couldn't do before in Java, it's that when you're writing event-driven or concurrent code, that code will be much more readable with Lambdas. And that means fewer bugs in the part of Java that is only going to grow more and more extensive.

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But I'm digressing here, because while I have and will link to Java 8 news as it comes, I actually wanted to talk about Java 9. Although that's 2 years away, it's useful to know some of what is being targeted there. So far I've been told it will include the following: some self-tuning features; memory efficient data structures; parallelized data support for massive multicore processing; and multi-tenancy support.

The last is what I'm focusing on in this newsletter. It's a response to integrate more usefully into the cloud, making optimal use of resources by increasing the density of applications without forcing application code to change in any way. If you look down to our news items, you'll see IBM have announced their multi-tenant JVM is now in beta - which means the Oracle JVM is now about 2 years behind in this space. And it's worth pointing out that IBM themselves are some way behind Waratek.

The challenges of multi-tenant JVMs include restricting the amount of resources that the applications sharing the JVM can take, and that's got to be down in the JVM kernel - otherwise tools like Echidna and Nailgun would already be in widespread use as solutions here (see our tools section below for more on those). I've listed all these multi-tenancy tools below in this month's tools section, and I've also broken this out into a new category page on fasterj.com.

Now on to all our usual links to Java performance tools, news, articles and, as ever, all the extracted tips from all of this month's referenced articles.

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News

Java performance tuning related news.

• IBM Java 8 beta JVM supports multi-tenancy
• Contemplate releases ThreadSafe 1.2, a tool for helping Java developers to avoid mistakes and inefficiencies when building applications with concurrency
• Some Date contructors are globally synchronized
• Java and the JVM is the choice for highly scaled websites

Tools

Java performance tuning related tools.

• Waratek - JVM able to run multiple applications independently in the same JVM (including metered availability of the underlying resources) - targeted as a cloud VM
• Echidna is a "multiprocess system" for running multiple Java applications in the same virtual machine
• Nailgun - for running multiple Java programs in the same JVM
• JNode Java based operating system implemented in the Java language
• Java Desktop Engine - shared virtual machine allows different java programs inside the same VM
• Multiprocess JVMs - article describing the mechanism in detail
• Run multiple applications in the same JVM (basic launcher)

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Articles

• Writing and Testing High Frequency Trading Engines in Java (Peter Lawrey/DZone)
• All Scalability Problems Have Only a Few Solutions (Frank Kelly/softarc)
• What are Reentrant Locks? (Anirudh Bhatnagar/DZone)
• 5 Coding Hacks to Reduce GC Overhead (Tal Weiss/takipiblog)
• The Anatomy of APM (Larry Dragich/JDJ)
• Write Optimization: Myths, Comparison, Clarifications (Leif Walsh/tokutek)

Jack Shirazi

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