Java 18 with Simple Web Server Appears and JavaOne Returns

Oracle has made Java 18 available. The new version of the programming language includes nine new features based on JDK Enhancement Proposals including Simple Web Server for code testing. The JavaOne conference returns this year.

Version 18 of the Java platform contains “thousands” of improvements for performance, stability, and security, according to Oracle. A total of 2062 JIRA issues have had a fix, of which 1261 by Oracle and 801 by the Java developer community. Of those fixes, 168 were done by individuals. In addition, nine JDK Enhancement Proposals have been implemented. For example, JEP 400 concerns the change that UTF-8 is now the character encoding of the standard Java APIs. This should ensure consistency and prevent unexpected behavior that could happen when developing and testing with one character encoding and running with the other.

Simple Web Server, JEP 408, offers a tool to quickly start a simple web server on localhost:8000 via command-line. Developers can easily see what their Java code looks like on the web. A third JEP is 413, which allows adding code snippets to the api documentation. Using the @snippet tag for JavaDoc, developers can easily put sample code into the api documentation.

At the same time, Oracle reports that JavaOne returns as part of Oracle CloudWorld taking place October 16-20 in Las Vegas. The company promises sessions on Java in combination with database, microservices, DevOps and machine learning. JavaOne was the annual Java developer event that Sun Microsystems first held in 1996. In 2018, Oracle announced that the event would stop and make way for the broader Oracle Code One.