Weekly Links: January 11, 2021

Tools

JetBrains: An Update on SolarWinds

In March 2020, the United States government and 200 organizations around the world were the target of a cyberattack. Because of software hijacked for the attack, this is known as the “SolarWinds hack”. What does that have to do with Java? Well, the New York Times reported that JetBrains TeamCity may have been used in the hack. JetBrains makes IntelliJ, and Team City is its continuous integration product.

So, that’s the kind of news that you can do without if you’re JetBrains. So starting January 6, they wrote three blog posts on three consecutive days ( here, here, and here). As of January 11, 2021, JetBrains has “no knowledge of TeamCity or JetBrains having been compromised in any way”. Let’s hope it stays that way!

Spring

Unblock Your Applications with R2DBC, Spring Data, and MariaDB

MariaDB is the open-source fork of MySQL. It has a reactive, non-blocking database driver in Java now. These drivers are called R2DBC. R2DBC is like JDBC, but, you know, reactive and non-blocking. Spring Data and Micronaut support them already. And now we can access MariaDB this way. Yay!

Releases

Netbeans 12.2

Talking about Java IDEs from Prague in the Czech Republic (JetBrains has its headquarters there, too): Good ol’ Netbeans has another release. I still remember how I led an evaluation of Netbeans vs. Eclipse back in 2001. The result? Even the Netbeans evaluators switched to Eclipse before we officially finished! Now Netbeans landed at Apache four years ago. And I’m sure it’s gotten much better now, though I haven’t touched it in years.

Anyhow, this new release supports the new features in Java 14 and 15. You know, like IntelliJ 2020.3 and Eclipse 2020-12. What else? It now automatically detects the Gradle wrapper distribution and has improved Lombok support. And there are the usual small changes and bug fixes. The complete release notes are here.

Over the Fence

Tiobe Declares Python Programming Language of 2020

Python is the “language of the year” in the TIOBE index for the fourth time. Now you can argue how accurate this index is. But it does carry weight.

The good news for us Java developers: Java is still #2. The bad news: We were #1 a year ago! In January 2020, Java had nearly 17%. Now it’s #2 behind C (17.38%) with just 11.96%. And we’re barely ahead of Python (11.72%)! Soon we’ll be just #3… 😢

Farewell to Flash

On January 12, 2021, Adobe will trigger the kill switch in Adobe Flash. This will block (any?) content from running in Flash Player. So Adobe Flash is officially dead now. And rightfully so: A browser plugin, full of security holes, has no place in a world of mobile apps and HTML 5.

But I must admit that I do have a soft spot for Flash. Why? Because it saved my bacon once! In 2006, I lead development of a web app. We needed to show a tree with tens of thousands of nodes. Internet Explorer 6 crapped out at a couple of thousand nodes. But then Adobe Flex arrived, a UI toolkit based on Flash. It easily ran a tree with 100,000 nodes - in Internet Explorer 6, using the Flash Player. And it had charts and data grids… So Adobe Flex saved us! 🤗 That Adobe Flex tree stayed in the web app until 2017, I think.