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Top Promising Women From The Java/JVM Community

Women continue to excel as developers, and we can see more and more women in the field every day. The Java/JVM community has plenty of talented women and we believe that it is time for them to receive some recognition for their work.

We have come up with a short list of women that had an impact in this community. The list only contains a few names, so feel free to tell us yours.

Heather VanCura

Heather is very dedicated when it comes to the JCP program and she is in fact Chair and Director of the JCP Program at Oracle. She worked at the JCP for 18 years and she had various functions. She also cares about women inclusion in tech.

Her goal is to help the JCP evolve and she aims to bring more diversity. Heather is an international speaker and she participated to various conferences such as Devoxx, JFokus, OSCON and the JavaOne conferences. At the moment she is living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jessica Kerr

Jessica has almost 20 years of experience, and she used almost everything, from Elm, Ruby, Scala, to Java and Clojure. She is a speaker and she talks about numerous issues related to the developing industry. Jessica is also a blogger and a podcaster from time to time. If you want to find out more about functional programming you should watch one of her talks.

Mala Gupta

If you have a Java programmer certification exam, you can always trust Mala’s books. Her writing is very clear and there are also pictures which can help you understand the information. Mala also founded eJavaGuru.com where you can find courses for Oracle certifications.

Katharine Beaumont

Katharine can do everything, including law, mathematics and science. At the moment she is living on a farm, but she continues to work as a developer. She is one of the most important names in the industry. She has worked on machine learning, Big Data and medical software. She also has plenty of experience with Ruby, Python and Matlab.

Recently her talks focused on AI, machine learning and neural networks, but she covered many other topics as well. She used to be the Community and Content Manager for Voxxed.

Jeanne Boyarsky

Jeanne develops at a bank in New York City and she has been doing this for more than 12 years. She is also a senior moderator at CodeRanch.com, but you can also find her mentoring the programming division of a FIRST robotics team.

Jeanne also writes books which are ideal if you are studying for your Java 8 certification exams. Jeanne was present in two talks: Intro to Mutation Testing and Junit 5 Hands-On Lab, which took place this year at JavaOne. If you take a look on YouTube you will be able to find some of her presentations as well.

Trisha Gee

Trisha is well known for her Java achievements. She has created numerous Java applications that are used in various industries. You can also find Trisha blogging if you want to learn more about her experiences. She is a Java Champion, a MongoDB Master, a member of the London Java Community and the leader of the Sevilla Java User Group.

Linda van der Pal

If you heard about Duchess, you already know who Linda is. She is the founder of Duchess, but she has plenty of other achievements as well. She has been a Java developer for 16 years and she is a co-organizer of Devoxx for kids in Netherlands. At the moment, Linda is a developer at Finalist.

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MySQL 8: An Overview of the Latest Resources and Security

The availability of the MySQL Community Server 8.0.12 version was announced by Unisecure Data Centers recently. MySQL aims to improve certain developer activities such as DLL Operations, sub-query optimization, and many others. We are going to take a closer look at the latest version and see what it has to offer.

Resource groups

This feature might be the most interesting ones. It can be used by developers in order to assign threads to specific groups. We do not have that many details about the resource groups feature, as there is only one documentation page for it.

You should know that there are attributes for a group, and they allow them to control certain resources, as well as their consumption. The attributes can be changed by the DBAs. For example, virtual CPU represents a manageable resource. Administrators can decide which thread will have priority when it comes to the usage of CPU, and certain resource groups can be associated with virtual CPUs.

There are also disadvantages if this is set by thread. For example, you might end up not assigning the group properly, as long as you don’t analyse the process list. You might also need to have a script running all the time. Additionally, there are some risks if you do this. If you use ProxySQL and multiplexing or connection pooling when you set this to a thread, it is possible that you assign limitations to queries.

Security

The MySQL8 added numerous security enhancements. For example, there is a new caching_sha2_password authentication plugin available. Password hashing is used again, but this time caching is used in order to fix possible latency issues during connection.

Roles are also supported by MySQL, and they can be both granted and revoked. Another addition, is the fact that password history information is maintained. It is possible to restrict reuse of previous passwords. A list of passwords can be created, and a new password cannot be from that list. The restrictions are available for a certain period of time.

The DBAs are also able to require that all attempts to change the password of an account are verified. The verification process requires the user to specify the current password that he or she wants to replace. Therefore, it is impossible to change the password without knowing the current one.

Data dictionary

The new version of MySQL also comes with a data dictionary that contains information about database objects. Before this release, the dictionary existed in nontransactional tables and metadata files, but it is no longer stored there.

Improvements for InnoDB

There are also some InnoDB improvements. For example, restarting the server won’t affect the AUTO_INCREMENT = N table option. The value remains the same, even if the server restarts several time. This means that if you set a specific value, it won’t be alterered.

JSON additions

There are also several changes that aim to improve the functionality of JSON. For example, the ->> operator was added. Additionally, two JSON aggregation functions were added: JSON_ARRAYAGG() and JSON_OBECTAGG ().

Optimizer

There are also several optimizer enhancements

MySQL supports descending indexes. Until now, it was possible to scan an index in reverse order, but this affected the performance. Thanks to descending indexes, this isn’t the case anymore. MySQL also added support for the creation of functional index key parts, used to index expression values.

Invisible indexes are supports as well. This kind of index is maintained normally, with one exception: the index is not used by the optimizer. By default, indexes are visible, but you can choose to make them invisible.

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WhatsApp Messages to Be Read by Hackers If You Use Google Drive

Rumour has it hackers are going to be able to read your WhatsApp text messages, see your images and videos. This whole thing started when the company said that they have this plan of backing up the messages of the users to Google Drive, without having them pay for it.

WhatsApp does protect all the sent messages, videos and images, as well as documents, thanks to the end-to-end encryption. However, by backing up with Google Drive, you will stop this encryption and all of your text will as well be free for hackers.

Whatsapp allows people to back up their messages into Google Drive

Until now, these backups had a storage limit. But recently, they announced that there is going to be a partnership between them and this company – so no backup limit whatsoever. This also means that many people will make the most out of it, leaving even more people at risk.

It all started with a photo of a chain and a padlock in front of the WhatsApp logo. It’s good to keep in mind that, starting from the 12th of November, this thing will become a default option, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing since you can save all your data with no price at all.

But security experts say that there will be some problems. They advise all the users not to back up their messages to the cloud – ever – because that means they will send unencrypted copies or your files, videos, text messages or audios to your cloud provider.

Now, if you want your conversations to be safe, the person you’re talking to shouldn’t put the conversation in the cloud, either. Also, keep in mind that back-ups are not encrypted in the FAQ section.

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The Most Promising IoT Trends For This Year

IoT (Internet of Things) represents a trend that continues to become more and more popular. Numerous industries have benefited from IoT, and they owe their success to it. That is the reason while it is important to pay attention to this technology and see whether new opportunities emerge. We made some predictions regarding the future Internet of Things trends in order to make things easier for you.

Marketing campaigns that target the user specifically

It is no secret that marketers have access to lot of our data. In the future it is very likely that we will see personalized marketing campaigns. The approaches used will be different from what we see now, and each user will represent a target for the business owners. The marketing campaign will be personalized for each customer, in order to create a personal relationship to the product. The ads will be influenced by the behaviour of the user, as well as his or her traits.

Obviously, this has and will continue to raise concerns about the invasion of our privacy. It should be up to customers to decide how much information a company should have. However, if implemented correctly, we might see personal advertisements in the close future.

Artificial Intelligence and Big Data

In the future, the use of IoT will increase and there will be more smart devices. This also means that there will be more data that needs to be processed. Big Data will be needed and there should be tools that can handle it.

Artificial Intelligence appears to be the perfect solution. With the help of AI we could receive accurate results, and the data offered by computers should be a lot more precise than the one calculated by humans.

Mobile phones will have an increased importance

Our smartphone is arguably the most important device we own, and users take them everywhere with them. Therefore, it is very likely that the role of smartphones in IoT will be more important in the future. This will make things more convenient for all of us, and it will be a lot easier to manage smart homes.

This could also mean that mobile phones will represent a target for cyber attackers in the future. Therefore, the security of these devices should be improved; otherwise the entire system could be compromised.

Security problems

While IoT technology does come with many advantages, it also makes users more vulnerable. Cyber-attacks happen frequently, and technology has its flaws. Therefore, before the Internet of Things technology is implemented, it is very important that its vulnerabilities are analyzed in order to protect all users.

Security concerns are very important, and we must always consider the risks that come with a heavy use of the IoT technology. In the future, cyber-attacks could target our entire house, and that is something we should protect ourselves against. Our lives could also be in danger, as insulin pumps or implanted pacemakers are vulnerable as well.

More interconnected devices

The number of devices connected together might grow this year. This will allow Internet of Things processes to evolve and they will become more accurate as well. You should also keep in mind that phones and computers aren’t the only smart devices we use. There are numerous new products, such as smart doors or smart clocks, and they can all be connected together.

By increasing the number of devices, personal use will become a possibility when it comes to IoT. “Smart cities” lead by this technology represents a possibility in the future, and there are already countries that have taken this into consideration.

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Top Java 10 New Features You Need To Learn About

Java 10 is the latest release of Java and it is already available online. While many developers are still using Java 9 and Java 8, it is worth taking a good look at the latest release. If you are waiting for the next LTS release, you might want to get Java 11, which comes out in September. These major releases take place every three years.

However, there are also six-month releases, according to a new schedule. Java 10 was released according to this plan. There are plenty of new features we should talk about, so let’s get it started.

Root Certificates

Developers might be more interested in OpenJDK builds, because a default set of root Certification Authorities will be provided. This also means that Oracle JDK and OpenJDK builds will be more similar from now on.

You should remember the fact that JDK 10 was in fact created by collaboration with OpenJDK, which is one of the reasons why this features makes sense.

Thread-Local Handshakes

The VM performance will be enhanced thanks to this new feature. It could be possible for JVM to stop individual threads. That is because you won’t have to perform a global VM savepoint when making a callback on applications threads.

The Native-Header Generation Tool is removed

Java 10 aims to remove all the things that aren’t needed. For example, the javah tool will be removed from JDK. This tool was used to generate header files when compiling JNI code. There is no need for an individual tool, as programmers can do this through javac.

A single repository

Java 10 came with many changes that are meant to tidy up the place. For example, the JDK forest will be consolidated, as numerous repositories will be combined into a singled repository. This should make things simpler.

Alternative Memory Devices with Heap Allocation

With the help of this new feature, it will be possible to allocate the Java object heap on the alternative memory device chosen by the user. The HotSpot VM will be allowed to do this. Using this feature you could choose where to allocate the higher priority processes, as well as lower priority ones.

Time-Based Release Versioning

After the JDK 10 release, we all know that Java has a brand new release plan. We should expect a new release every six months. This decision has both pros and cons. For example, some people are excited about the new features and enhancements that come every six months, but others believe that it is not enough time to adopt a JDK. Big releases, LTS ones, take place every three years.

You should also know that the Feature element will be incremented one month before the Update element will be incremented as well. This new schedule was called Time-Based Release Versioning and it was announced by Java.

Java-based JIT Compiler

For those who use Graal, the Java-Based JIT compiler, you should know that a new feature allows it to be used on the Linux/x64 as an experimental JIT compiler. We received Graal back in Java 9. If you want to enable it you will need to use these JVM arguments: -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseJVMCICompiler.

Don’t forget that the JIT compiler remains experimental at the moment, which means that you should be careful when you use it.

You can discover the other features of Java 10 by installing it. It can be downloaded from the Oracle official website. You can also find the release notes from this update if you want to learn more about the new features and changes.

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