Presentation: Project Jigsaw in JDK 9: Modularity Comes To Java

Track: 

Location:

Duration

Duration: 
11:50am - 12:40pm

Day of week:

Key Takeaways

  • Gain more insight into the goals of Jigsaw. 
  • Understand how Jigsaw may impact developers in the upcoming Java 9 release. 
  • Plan for some of the changes that are occurring to internal API’s.

Abstract

Project Jigsaw will bring modularity to the Java platform; something that will enable better security, performance and flexibility for deployment of applications. This talk will look at the fundamentals of how modularity in Java will work. Developers will need to understand that these changes go significantly further than just separating the standard class libraries into a number of discrete units.

This talk will explain the impact project Jigsaw will have on developers in terms of building their applications, as well as helping them to understand how things like encapsulation will change in JDK 9.

Interview

Question: 
QCon: What is your role today?
Answer: 
Simon: I am the Deputy CTO of Azul Systems, a company that specialises in delivering high-quality Java virtual machines (JVMs)
Question: 
QCon: Can you explain your title a bit to me?
Answer: 
Simon: The idea of the title is to let people know that I will be covering how Java will change in the next release, JDK 9. Specifically, I’ll be discussing the introduction of a modular class library and the ability to package application code using the new module system.
Question: 
QCon: What’s the motivation for your talk?
Answer: 
Simon: To help developers understand what the significant changes will be in JDK 9. Although the release is just over a year away there are things that developers should be aware of, and plan for, so that they can get the most from JDK 9. As Azul Systems is focused on delivering both commercial and FOSS versions of the JVM (through Zing and Zulu respectively), we want to help developers understand all the issues.
Question: 
QCon: What are your key takeaways for this talk?
Answer: 
Simon: Really to understand that there are some significant changes happening in the Java platform when JDK 9 is released. Also, for anyone who has been using internal APIs from the JDK (like the infamous sun.misc.Unsafe class) how access to these classes will be changing.
In the Virtual JUG from last week, there you mentioned the changes with Jigsaw go a bit deeper than just breaking things up into modules. For example, you discussed class visibility across modules. Could you explain that a bit?
In the past developers have always understood that a public class is accessible from any code in an application. With Jigsaw and modules it will be possible to encapsulate classes in such a way that public classes are only visible to other classes in the same module, or ones that import that given module. Public will no longer mean accessible in the way that it has up until now.
Question: 
QCon: What are some other things from Jigsaw that affect developers and they will learn about in your talk?
Answer: 
Simon: I’ll cover the basics of how you create modules, how you import them, export only the classes you want to and how to understand readability of classes versus dependency in modules.
Question: 
QCon: What is the main thing you want people to leave with from your talk?
Answer: 
Simon: A basic understanding of what project Jigsaw is and what impact it will have on them when they start to use JDK 9.

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