Duke's Corner Live at JavaOne

The Duke’s Corner Java Podcast contributed an 11 minute segment to the Community Keynote at JavaOne 2025 in California in March. Jim Grisanzio from Oracle Java Developer Relations hosted the program with special guests Cay Horstmann, Marit van Dijk, and Lize Raes. The panel covered the latest bits in Java, how to contribute to the community, and the best bits from JavaOne. Everyone had a great time!

Here’s the full Community Keynote session from JavaOne in March 2025.

Archive

All images from JavaOne 2025.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome, everybody. Welcome to Duke's Corner Live. So Duke's Corner is a podcast that I started on the Oracle Java Developer Relations team in 2022. So we're just running about three years. We got about 60 episodes in the can. And in some ways, it's a very traditional podcast. We talk about Java, obviously, the community, hackers,

0:28

open source, things like this, a lot of education and learning. You know, Java developers have to keep up with everything and grow and things like that. So it's really cool in that respect and it's very informational. There's no frills. There's no bumper music or anything like that. It's just conversations.

0:44

But the most important thing for me is hearing the stories of Java developers. So sometimes you hear stories about, hey, I got to do X, Y, and Z. I have to learn this. I have to contribute to OpenJDK. What do I do? Things like that. but also you hear stories like, hey, Java saved my life.

1:03

Java, you took me out of poverty. I'm now able to fund my college education or things like that. These are the stories that really inspire me, and that's why I do the podcast. I'm really interested to hear the stories of developers, and through those stories, you learn about all the other things, Java, and Jugs,

1:29

you know, OpenJDK and everything else. But it's the profile. It's the story from the developer. So that's it. It's very simple. If you just search, you know, for Duke's Corner, you know, podcast, you'll find it and love you to listen. And I've met a lot of developers here, obviously,

1:45

so I'm excited to have some new programs in the coming year. But for the next few minutes here, let's just run a little session. I got a couple of my colleagues here in the background here, so we'll bring out Kai Hortzman and Marit van Dijk and Lisa Reis. We'll have a little session. Okay, welcome.

2:15

So let's talk tech, let's talk community and maybe get a little personal too. So Kai, lead us off with some tech here. So OpenJDK, you know, so Java 24, sorry, is out this week. And what's the most important thing that developers should pay attention to or

2:33

what's the most interesting thing in the latest releases to help them with productivity or just to do something really, really cool?

2:40

Well, every release has a lot of things, and I think everyone is different in what they like. What I was most excited about was the developments that help you write small Java programs more easily, both to learn Java and also to use Java in the small. It's actually a fantastic language. for smaller programs.

2:58

The other thing that I personally liked were there were some things that made my programs run better or faster or with less memory with me doing either nothing at all or very little. The garbage collector is getting even better. I'm excited about seeing Project Leiden where I can get my program to start up faster. Cool. Any thoughts?

3:20

Yeah, I'm excited about the stream gatherers that were released in Java 24, as well as advances in or improvements in pattern matching. I really enjoyed Brian Getz's talk on Tuesday about where the language is going and to get a bit of context and see how the changes are actually like progression in a direction.

3:45

I also really like that he mentioned that they're working on improving readability of the code. Mark Reinhold mentioned the same in the opening keynote. That's a topic dear to my heart because we read code more than we write code. So anything that makes it easier to read, easier to understand, easier to work with is great.

4:05

Excellent.

4:06

I also like very much, as Kai said, what makes it easier to ramp up and onboard in Java. So these simple source files, we're dropping the static. That's the big thing. I also saw somebody give a talk about Jupyter Notebooks for Java, and that just helps people getting onboarded so fast.

4:24

They say it's for people that are new to Java, but honestly, as a seasoned programmer, I also like it to just work faster. And the other thing I liked a lot, since I'm a collaborator on LangChain4J, which is working with AI and Java, we love this structured concurrency scope value,

4:40

which will make it much more easy to make agentic systems and to have this context for our LLMs. And, of course, everything that's more efficient, memory efficient, GPU acceleration that may be coming with Project Babylon, Project Valhalla, Project Panama. So I'm really looking forward to these things.

4:57

Cool. Well, it seems that there's endless. It's just an endless list here of really cool things. So we've got a lot of technology out there. We've got a lot of really interesting things for developers to grab a hold of and do things with. But how can developers actually participate in this community?

5:12

This is an open source community after all.

5:15

Yeah, so there are many ways to be involved in the community. Obviously, you can get up on stage and speak, but not everybody feels comfortable doing that. You can write blog posts or create videos or share your knowledge in other ways. But if you're not comfortable doing that, you can be involved in your local jugs,

5:34

you can help organize them, or even just attend and meet other people, share your experience, learn from and with each other.

5:45

Yeah, it may be a bit daunting for some developers to say, oh, I go on stage, oh, I write a blog even. And I just want to say there's something that you can do that's much lower threshold to help, and it is complain and give feedback. So in the opening keynote, Mark Reinhold,

6:01

Actually, what he did was saying, we're doing complaint-driven evolution of the Java language. And I like that because they go, look, what are the pain points? And that's where you can help. Tell us the pain points for your open source project, for the OpenJDK. And we will make the language better for you and for everybody else.

6:20

Yeah, I'd like to echo both of those points. First of all, just to show up at a meeting or anywhere. Showing up is great. When I give a presentation, I like to have people who are showing up. And the other thing is the complaint-driven development process has been working really well for Java. Java is very open.

6:36

There are multiple avenues for you to report your experiences with new features, say what you liked, and most importantly, what you didn't like. And there really are changes and improvements in the language that are based by programmer input.

6:52

Excellent. So there's many ways to contribute. You can even do a podcast, just like we're doing here, too. So one of the things I actually talk to a lot of developers about is what Java means to you in your heart, essentially. So do you have any thoughts about what Java means to you? It could be the technology,

7:08

some people like hacking, or it could be just the community or anything like that.

7:13

Well, I guess I'm a bit in a special situation because I was with Java from the very beginning. Before Java came out, my co-author, Gary Cornell, gave me a call and said, Kai, we're going to write a Java book. Neither of us knew anything about Java, so we had to learn it really fast.

7:26

And no one else knew anything about it either. But there we were when Java 1 was released with a stack of books. And ever since, I've been working with Java. I've really enjoyed interacting with the people that make Java happen, that make it better, and to learn more about it and to teach with it.

7:44

One of my best experiences, I thought, was when we were able to move the AP computer science exam from C++ to Java.

7:52

Cool. Yeah, I first learned Java in university, not quite from the beginning. I learned Java 1.2. We won't do the math on how long ago that was. And then I did a bunch of other jobs in IT and had to relearn Java, which was Java 8 at the time,

8:08

which was much improved from what I remembered from university. And I actually relearned Java by reading books by... Gene Bajarski and Scott Selikoff for the OCA OCP guides, as well as a book by Mala Gupta, who is now my colleague and teammate. So yeah, that worked out really well for me.

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I really like how she explains Java concepts really well. And it's been part of my career ever since.

8:36

Beautiful.

8:36

That's a really exciting trajectory. For me, I can certainly not say that I was with Java from the beginning because I was five years old. But I started, I actually came in from the side, I started electronics engineering. So at the beginning when I started as a regular Java developer,

8:52

it was hard for me and Java was mainly the way where I could not do what I wanted. But I got better. I learned it. And now Java is really a way for me to build, to change my ideas into something tangible in the real world. And then I started contributing.

9:07

And now it brought me here on stage. So it's been really a huge, become a huge love story by now.

9:13

Excellent. Okay, we just have a minute and a half left here, so let's wrap up by talking about this conference here this week. It's been a blistering week. It's a lot of happy faces. Everyone's been really cool. For us, the team who are organizing this, we're all tired and exhausted, but it's been really a beautiful experience.

9:31

I'm wondering if you have any impressions about this week.

9:35

Well, I'm very glad that Java 1 has been back and that the hallway track is as good as it always was. I've learned so much.

9:43

Yeah, it's been really good attending talks by people who actually work on the language and getting a lot of context on why changes are made. But the most important part is the people seeing everyone here.

9:55

I also find it really exciting to hear from the architects themselves, where they are evolving, what they just built, show their own demos. And one talk stuck with me, that was the talk about somebody at Jefferson Lab, where they do nuclear physics in a particle accelerator. They started using AI instead of analytical methods to fix this,

10:15

using a Java framework, Deepnets, which you can just download, it's free for individual use, so I just did that yesterday. They managed to speed up this analytics from needing many, many, many CPUs and all data centers to get it on one laptop, 5,000 times more efficient to track these collision paths by AI.

10:34

I'm getting really excited from these real-world use cases that we can do with Java.

10:39

Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for joining me. And that's just a little snip of Duke's Corner. And we did it live here. And next up on the show here is my colleague David DeLabasse to talk about the Quality Outreach Program. And that's it. Thank you. And have a good rest of the show. Cheers.