I know, I know – 2018 is not over yet! But I feel like it’s a good time to take a step back and look at some of the most trending technologies we saw in 2018, talk a bit about their status and what questions are raised about their prospects. And of course, since we are in a general voting mood (see US midterm elections), we have a poll at the end of the article where you can tell us about your predictions for 2019.

“OpenJDK is the future of Java,” Rich Sharples told us earlier this week. So if this is the case (and we think it is!), you should get involved with OpenJDK as soon as possible. And if you’re interested in the continuation of JDK 8 after Oracle relinquishes their leadership, now’s the time to have a say in the development of JDK 8u.

Back in the old days of floppy disks and dial up, we had to be very conscious of our memory usage. In these days of cloud storage and terabyte storage, not so much. However, Ram Lakshmanan explains how you can trim the wasted space from your applications and ensure that your apps are efficient as possible

Women are underrepresented in the tech sector —myth or reality? Last year, we launched a diversity series aimed at bringing the most inspirational and powerful women in the tech scene to your attention. Today, we’d like you to meet Sarika Sinha, Senior Software Engineer at IBM.

This is the second part in a series of articles covering Manifold, a unique, open source technology you can use in any Java project to enable cutting-edge language features such as type-safe metaprogramming, extension methods, templating, and structural typing. In this segment, Scott McKinney discusses Extension Classes, an innovative feature that enables you to supplement a class with your own methods, interfaces, and other features.

There are a bunch of misunderstandings in testing, starting with the fact that we never fully understand why we should test code and what is the idea of testing. Software testing is not only necessary; it is one of the foundations of this industry. We caught up with lx-chel Ruiz at JAX London 2018 to debunk some of the testing myths and to talk about the many tools that exist and when they should be used.

The tech world is moving fast and we’re in for the ride! The JDK 12 development repositories are open and we thought it’s time to start a new thread in order to keep track of everything that’s going live. Today we have only but a small updated with Microbenchmark Suite becoming targeted to JDK 12.

Houston, we had a data visualization problem. Now, thanks to NASA’s Open MCT, developers can take advantage of this space-age web-based mission control framework for data visualization on mobile and desktop.

Users of Zeit’s Now are in for a surprise. The new v2 release has some very different changes and additions. No upgrade is without its downsides, so let’s take a look at the good and the bad of the newly released Now v2.

Looking to save time on integration? Vyne is a new cross-platform tool for automating API orchestration. What makes this project so smart?

Facebook is on a roll! The company recently announced that they would soon release some internal tools and they did not disappoint. The latest tool to be open sourced is Getafix, which learns from engineers’ past code fixes to recommend bug fixes. Getafix aims to let computers take care of the routine work under the watchful eye of a human. Let’s take a closer look.

The search for the golden fleece (re: an open source container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes) is over! Introducing Argo, a relative newcomer to the field with a whole host of exciting features, including Docker-in-Docker solutions, continuous delivery, and more.

The confusion over the rights to use Oracle JDK vs Oracle’s OpenJDK builds vs OpenJDK builds from other providers has been hovering over us for quite some time but now that the confusion has been untangled, it’s time to focus on the things that drive Java’s future; one such example is OpenJDK. We talked to Red Hat’s Rich Sharples about Java’s future and the company’s role in all this.

Instead of using a cross-compiler or existing framework, why not try Eclipse Spotty for your web-based diagramming framework needs? In this article, Jan Köhnlein introduces this new Eclipse project and explores how developers can add modern diagrams to their web apps with minimal effort.