Android Nougat

New this week: Android Nougat, the future of VR, the future of Java and more

Android Nougat is delicious

Android Nougat
Android Nougat
Google announced on June 30th that the name of Android 6 N is officially Nougat, in line with the naming tradition using deserts. So, it’s not Nutella and it’s not Namey McNameface like mentioned humorously 2 weeks ago. A lot of people were rooting for Nutella, however probably there would have been some trademarking issues, though they pulled it off with Kitkat.Anyway, Nougat sounds delicious and also makes it easier to to search and find on Google “Android Nougat” rather than “Android Nutella”, the latter search already killing any chance for finding an Android app from Nutella.

Is Oracle silently killing Java?

Oracle J2EE
Oracle J2EE

Oracle has quietly cut funding from open source projects under its umbrella. Just like with other open source projects acquired by the business giant, Open Solaris and OpenOffice have found their end under Oracle and a behavior pattern emerged. A pattern in which Oracle buys open source solution, competition or not, then commercializes them or closes them down all together. Seems that Java is next. More specific Java Enterprise Edition, the knife and bread of many business web application developers (me included).

For some while now Oracle has been conducting legal battles with Google over Android’s Dalvik programming language. This, added to the fact that the Java EE development on the Oracle side has been frozen raises concerns about the future of Java.

Reza Rahman, formerly working for Oracle on the Java EE team became the spokesman for the group called Java EE Guardians, a group that set out to fight for keeping Java EE alive. The group initiated an online petition to tell Oracle to Move Forward Java EE as a Critical Part of the Global IT Industry. So far over 1900 people signed the petition and 2500 are needed for

In my view letting Java EE die would be a damn shame. But, on the up side, when talking about business web application this pushes the discussions further on viable alternatives. Everyone, smile and say NodeJS? If Java EE really goes down, PayPal will sure be happy it switched to NodeJS a while back.

VR is here, now what?

htc vive
HTC Vive

Undoubtedly the most exciting developments in technology lately have been in the VR world. Oculus and Vive being the biggest players yet on this market. HTC announced this week that:

HTC can confirm that it has established a wholly-owned subsidiary, HTC Vive Tech Corporation, as a vehicle for developing strategic alliances to help build the global VR ecosystem.

In translation, HTC Vive is doing very well on the consumer market, but they want to separate assets from its not so well performing HTC smart phones division. Well, this should secure the future of VR with HTC and looking forward to see where they take this technology.

What does the future hold for VR? Well everybody is looking at Sony and Microsoft, waiting for a serious response in this market.

Google is fueling VR with cardboard VR box and offering more and more support on the software side. See YouTube 360 and more recently Chrome for Android introduced WebVR – an experimental open source JavaScript API for making just about anything in a browser VR-ready.

Also in support of VR technology, NBC announced this week it would provide 85 hours of virtual reality programing during the Rio Olympics in August. Unfortunately only those who own Samsung Galaxy smartphones and the Gear VR headset will be able to catch the fully-immersive 360-degree experience, but I think that this is a huge step forwards for VR.

WiFi just got faster with 802.11ac wave 2

802.11ac wave 2
Better faster WiFi

The so-called “Wave 2” of the 802.11ac specification was announced this week by wi-fi.org promising among other things faster transfer speeds, but also the possibility of sending up to 433Mbps to at least three users simultaneously for a total of 1.3Gbps when coupled with MU-MIMO routers (multi-user multiple input multiple output). Also the newly certified technology doubles the bandwidth boosting the potential throughput of each stream to 866Mbps. Faster WiFi cannot be bad, so good news!

John Negoita

View posts by John Negoita
I'm a Java programmer, been into programming since 1999 and having tons of fun with it.

2 Comments

  1. […] seems that the petition mentioned in my earlier post about the future of Java Enterprise Edition was not in vain. On July 8, 2016 Oracle Vice President of Marketing Communications and Global […]

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  2. […] one of my old post I was looking at the future of VR. Well, it seems that the industry is on a continuous rise. It’s a hard to accept fact, but […]

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