Java Magazine, March/April 2016

learn more ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE MARCH APRIL 2016 39 inside java output is alleviated There are several mechanisms that make running annotation processors completely seamless For example all it takes is for the JAR file containing your processor to be on the classpath for javac to detect it and run it Annotation processors have become particularly important on Android because they enable library developers to replace reflection calls which are slow and therefore a special concern on Android with direct calls On top of that the generated source code makes it possible to statically verify that your code is correct something that cant be achieved with reflection Conclusion Annotations are an integral part of the Java platform They have allowed the language and the ecosystem to evolve in innovative and productive directions that wouldnt have been possible otherwise Its important to understand how they work and to know what they are capable of so that you can make informed decisions about using them in your own codebase article Cédric Beust @ cbeust has been writing Java code since 1996 and he has taken an active role in the development of the language and its libraries through the years He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Nice France He was a member of the Expert Group that designed annotations for the JVM Oracles Java annotations tutorial Checker Framework which uses annotations heavily to check code enterprise Oracle Cloud Services for Java Developers Oracle has been rolling out cloud services for developing and deploying Java applications These services complement existing services that Oracle offers at all the major cloud tiers infrastructure as a service IaaS platform as a service PaaS and software as a service SaaS With these rollouts there are now multiple cloud services of interest to Java developers of which these three will be discussed in technical detail in future issues Oracle Application Container Cloud provides rapid selfservice provisioning of dedicated and isolated Java SE and Node runtime application containers in the cloud These containers run Oracle JDK version 7 or 8 which includes Oracle Java Flight Recorder a tool that is not available in the standard JDK The solution also offers Node js which is the server side JavaScript environment Billing is done either by the month or by the hour and billed per gigabyte of RAM Oracle Developer Cloud Service is a free entitlement of Oracle Java Cloud Service see next item and is described as a PaaS environment for the enterprise It includes instances of Git Maven Hudson the continuous integration tool a tasks tool and a wiki The Hudson instance allows three concurrent builds Oracle Java Cloud Service offers Oracle WebLogic Server either 11g or 12c running either in a cluster or on dedicated virtual machines This service also offers Oracle Coherence caching and in memory data grid as an option An additional SaaS Extension enables integration with Oracle Software as a Service including Oracle Sales Cloud Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud