Java Magazine - July/August 2012

//from the editor /

ava developers are known to be passionate, even religious, about their IDEs and other tools. With the emergence of a whole slate of new open source and commercial tools (virtually all of them cloud-based) over the past five years, there’s an awful lot to be passionate about.

There are several reasons for this Cambrian explosion of solutions in this area. For one, agile development practices, which are now extremely common on a global scale, cry out for collaborative tools that make the continuous build process manageable. Development teams are also more geographically dispersed than ever before. Furthermore, the popularity and easy availability of many thousands of open source modules and frameworks, which are otherwise often integrated into an application’s code base without much regard for their provenance, make code governance a bit more important than in the past.

There is also a cloud-related factor to be considered on the supply side of the equation: cloud computing has simply made it possible for many of these solutions to be brought to a broad market in a relatively frictionless way. Furthermore, online communities like Java.net and GitHub have wrapped up some of these technologies in nice social packages that speed adoption through network effects.

But enough abstract discussion. Jump to this issue’s special feature on the topic, “Developer Power” (not intended to be exhaustive, just representative).

Speaking of passion: Zoran Severac’s “Java People” performance impressed us so much that we’re opening a general Java Nation call for songs. If you’re a songwriter who appreciates Java and the Java community, send us a link to your composition. It may become our official Java Nation anthem!