Something for Java Developers

While common users are still preoccupied with security issues and threats that Java usage can expose them to, Oracle and Java developers are more interested in tools, which ensure their joining the crowd of iOS developers.
Despite the renowned Apple’s ban to run Java apps and applets on iOS devices, there has always been a range of tools which helped port Java applications to the iOS gadgets.  The list of such tools, which include third-party open source frameworks as well as Oracle’s ADF (Application Development Framework) Mobile, has been expanded by another Oracle release.
Google offers open source J2ObjC translator for Java code to be translated into Objective-C source code, which Apple desires to see on its devices.
Other services which allow Java developers to see their masterpieces on Apple devices are Codename One and Vaadin. Codename uses cloud services for building apps for an Apple device, while Java development and debugging takes place locally. Vaadin is at hand to build apps for the iPad, mainly web apps to be precise. Although the functionality of the service might seem a bit limited, it was quite handy at the launch of the iPad when everybody was crazy about having an app on the device. That array of tools more or less filled the gap and allowed Java developers to join the development whirlpool for Apple mobile devices.
However, the time has come for Oracle to care for its followers once again. New Java Native Interface Proposal was created last month and meant to modify the JDK and provide Java developers with a possibility to pack a Java runtime, native application code, and Java application code without shared libraries. Many Java experts view the release as a kind of an advantage, which will expand Java developers’ abilities within the iOS environment though at the expense of some prior releases such as Java Micro Edition.
The new advances prove that despite security breaches of which Oracle was blamed just a month ago, the company is determined to guarantee its Java developers a comfortable place in the iOS development community. Apple, though not particularly happy with Java apps on its portable devices, so far kept silent on the issue.

New Java 7 Released

On July 28 Oracle announced the release of the Java Platform Standard Edition 7 (Java SE 7). That’s the first release of the Java platform since the time when the control over the platform development moved from the Sun Corporation to Oracle.

Java SE 7 is the first big Java release for the last five years. The release is the teamwork of Oracle engineers and also the global community of Java developers who participated in the development of the platform within the OpenJDK community. In the process of development 9,494 bugs were fixed, 1,966 updates were introduced, 9,018 package corrections were released, 147 installations were performed and 4 requests for Java (JSR) specification were sent.

Java SE 7 includes the changes aimed at improving the platform efficiency and simplifying routine tasks of a programmer. Some efforts were also undertaken to make standard operations require less code and the language syntax be more transparent, which enables easy listings reading. Also the release presents the improved efficiency of the dynamic programming languages working on JVM, such as Ruby, Groovy, Python and JavaScript. The new interface for developing applications for multinuclear systems enables the breakdown of the tasks for concurrent processing between any numbers of processor’s nucleus.

Now Java developers, interested in the new language version, can start working with Java SE 7. The popular integrated development environments (IDE), such as NetBeans 7.0, IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 or Eclipse Indigo with the Java SE 7 plug-in, already supports new Java features. By the end of the year, the JDK 7 support will have been realized in the Oracle JDeveloper environment.

According to Oracle, there are about nine million java software developers in the world. The number of platform downloads is about one billion a year and the number of devices working with Java exceeds 2 billion.

Apple became the world’s leader at the number of vulnerabilities

Apple Corporation became the world’s leader at the number of vulnerabilities detected in its applications, writes Ars technica with reference to the research conducted by the company Secunia specialized in IT security.
Apple managed to overcome the former leader at the number of vulnerabilities – Oracle Corporation. The third place is occupied by Microsoft, HP, Adobe, IBM, VMWare, Cisco, Google and Mozilla Corporation are also in the top ten. In general, these 10 companies are responsible for 38 % of all detected vulnerabilities.
The report covering the first half of the year 2010 doesn’t reflect the seriousness of the detected errors, bugs and vulnerabilities. Thus, the products from Apple application developers can be rather safe if their disadvantages are very difficult to use for cracking.
Secunia has been keeping the record of vulnerabilities since 2005 and annually detects in average 4464 problems connected with security. More than 80 % of vulnerabilities allow cracking the system remotely, 10 % require for cracking the access to the local system and 8% require the access to the local network.