Java Magazine, Jan/Feb 2017
ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JANUARY FEBRUARY 2017 15 ART BY I HUA CHEN F ew things are as exciting to us developers as tools Nearly TOOLS everything we do we do indirectly through the use of tools on which we depend And in fact good developers are always characterized by deep knowledge of the tools they use and how best to apply them With this in mind in our first article page 17 we examine the latest evolution of Maven called Polyglot Maven which frees us from creating build files in XML Polyglot opens the door to using real scripting language for writing build files This idea is taken one step further in our article page 22 on a new build tool Kobalt being written in Kotlin a Java like JVM language This article is actually more about the architecture of build tools what goes on underneath the covers However the authors design uses Kotlin as the language for defining the build In this way as he points out not only do you gain true expressivity in the build file but your IDE can catch errors as you describe your build The increasingly popular build tool Gradle is moving in the same direction migrating its build files from Groovy syntax to Kotlin We also cover page 29 the uncommon but not rare situation in which your debugger does not give you all the information you need to fix your code We examine a debugging API for the JVM that enables you to extract information about running processes view variables and classes query counters and get at details you might need This information is surprisingly easy to access and enables you to write one of debugging scripts to solve unusual or complex problems To complement this information Oracles Brian Goetz discusses lexical language changes supporting localvariable type inference page 60 Also we do a deep dive into Scala page 47 Finally one of the coolest articles page 36 weve run in a long time how to get started programming Blockchain the technology behind cryptocurrencies Add to this our in depth language quiz page 63 and we hope youll find this issue to be packed with useful information Java and JVM Tools POLYGLOT MAVEN 17 INSIDE BUILD TOOLS 22 JVM DEBUGGING 29 LOCAL VARIABLE TYPE INFERENCE 60
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