The 2013 Duke's Choice Award poll is live now at java.net (on the right-hand column). All members of the Java community (that's you!) are encouraged to cast your vote today for the second annual Community Choice award category.  All winners will be announced at JavaOne, via press release and in Java Magazine's September/October issue.

Vote now as the poll will close Monday August 12th. 

What is the developer community like in China? I put this question to several members of the Java developer community while at JavaOne Shanghai. "Big!" "Passionate!" "They asked good technical questions." "Eager to learn." Find out what JUG leaders and Oracle had to say on this topic. You can view the entire JavaOne Shanghai playlist and lots of other videos on the Java YouTube channel. 

Anissa Lam, member of the Java EE team, describes her activities at JavaOne Shanghai and her thoughts about the Java developer community in China.

Jim Jiang speak to Kang Sze Lin, leader of TaiWan JUG, Leo Yu (余知权) @余知权Leo, leader of Shanghai JUG, and JianHao Mo (莫建豪) @坤谷, leader of GreenTea JUG. (In Chinese.)

View entire JavaOne Shanghai Playlist. For resources in China, visit 

• oracle.com/technetwork/cn
• eweibo.com/javacommunity
• The Java Channel on YouKu 甲骨文视界 

Do you want to have your video listed on the YouTube Java Channel? Visit bit.ly/YouOnJavaChannels for details.

A new article, now up on otn/java, titled “Garbage First Garbage Collector Tuning,”
by Monica Beckwith, Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle, and performance lead for the Java HotSpot VM's Garbage First Garbage Collector (G1 GC), shows how to adapt and tune the G1 GC for evaluation, analysis, and performance.

As Beckwith explains, the Garbage First Garbage Collector is the low-pause, server-style generational garbage collector for Java HotSpot VM. It uses both concurrent and parallel phases to achieve its target pause time and maintain good throughput. A garbage collector is a memory management tool. When G1 GC determines that a garbage collection is necessary, it first collects the regions with the least live data – known as garbage first.

Beckwith describes the collection phases and marking cycles, lists default tuning devices, offers recommendations about how to fine tune and evaluate garbage collection, and shows how to respond to overflow and exhausted log messages.

She concludes her article as follows:

“G1 GC is a regionalized, parallel-concurrent, incremental garbage collector that provides more predictable pauses compared to other HotSpot GCs. The incremental nature lets G1 GC work with larger heaps and still provide reasonable worst-case response times. The adaptive nature of G1 GC just needs a maximum soft-real time pause-time goal along-with the desired maximum and minimum size for the Java heap on the JVM command line.”

Check it out here.

by Guest Blogger Edgar Alberto Martinez Cruz

Oracle Java Day was held in Oracle’s Mexico Development Center offices Saturday, July 27^th. Over 150 developers attended the event. This was the first [Oracle] Java event in Mexico and was organized by Guadalajara Java User Group. The event was promoted through the web page gdljug.mx. Timing was perfect to celebrate the Java EE 7 launch, and developers got together to learn what is coming in Java EE 7, and also in Java 8. The tracks included Java EE 7 New features, Introduction to Java EE, JavaFX with Java EE 7, and Lambdas in Java 8.

Two conferences occupied the first half of the day. Java Champion Jorge Vargas shared his experiences as CTO of the startup Yumbling in his talk “Geolocation in mobile devices”.  Next, Bruno Borges presented the new features in Java EE 7. Bruno has been traveling these days across several Latin American countries for the OTN Latin America Tour 2013 talking about GlassFish, WebLogic and Java EE 7. The second half of the Java Day was for the four workshops running in parallel; people enjoyed practicing the new Java EE 7 APIs and Lambdas in Java 8. The Java community in Mexico really enjoyed the event and is waiting now for the next one!

You can view more pictures of the event on Flicker and Facebook.

The Oracle Technology Network Tour 2013 brings several community and Oracle speakers to OUGs (Oracle User Groups) and JUGs across Latin America. Check the official OTN Tour 2013 page for countries, dates, and speakers. Also, watch for #LAOTNTOUR on Twitter and Facebook. You can follow Bruno on Twitter @BrunoBorges.

Do you want to have your blog posted on the Java Source? Email OTNFEEDBACKunderscoreUSatORACLEdotCOM, or visit bit.ly/YouOnJavaChannels for details.

JavaOne Shanghai was held last week in Shanghai. It was a joint event with Oracle Open World and OPN Exchange with a combined registeration of 19,000 people. I don't know the exact split of JavaOne attendees, but I'd guess around 1000 developers.

Peter Utzschneider, Vice President, Java Product Management, kicked off the JavaOne keynotes by explaining how Oracle, with the Java Community, will "Make the Future Java." He said Oracle is now, and will continue to: drive innovation and make the Java platform complete, provide tools to make it easy to develop and use Java, foster dialog with the community, and communicate clearly and continuously. As if to drive home the last point, Java Technology Ambassador and JavaOne Content Chair Stephen Chin introduced the rest of the keynote speakers in Mandarin (the audience was polite).

Throughout the conference, there was lots of interest in Java Embedded. In her keynote, Nandini Ramani, Vice President of Engineering, Java Client and Embedded Platforms, explained that the embedded space is very exciting. She said "We are surrounded by devices that are talking to each other," and "Java is the right solution for this space." Chris Baker, Senior Vice President, ISV, OEM and Java Sales, drove home the point that for IoT(the Internet of Things) to be successful, it will take an active ecosystem of Java developers to drive the innovation needed.  To demonstrate this, Chris invited Axel Hansmann, Vice President, Strategy & Marketing Communications of Gelmalto, to the stage. He explained that Gelmalto devices are everywhere, including thousands of Bank of China bank cards. Hansmann announced the Gelmato Bubble Board, which he called "the perfect way to get started with Java and M2M." Available in the Fall, developers can reserve a Bubble Board now.

 Cameron Purdy, Vice President, Cloud Application Foundation, came to the stage and discussed the recent release of Java EE 7. He explained the themes of the release are developer productivity, support of HTML 5 and meeting enterprise demands.  He mentioned the the important of Websockets and how they allow bidirectional communication. Purdy called JSON "the linga franca of the web," and explained that popular websites offer JSON as the data exchange format with their RESTful web services. [Ed Note: For an introduction to JSON, check out OTN's new tech article "Java API for JSON Processing."]

After these overviews, the Java Evangelists came to the stage drilled down on new Java features. It was clear that Oracle continues to innovate, communicate, and Make the Future Java.

Oracle has announced the general availability of  the latest releases to Java ME Embedded 3.3 and Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK) 3.3, a complete client Java runtime and toolkit optimized for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. This release includes improvements of interest to developers, including ways to not have to build so much "core plumbing" for an app, and more information about memory and network usage, which can be critical for low-power apps.

Java ME Embedded 3.3 includes:

• Binary implementations for popular development boards: Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.3 binaries are freely available available for download from OTN for development and testing for ARM architecture-based developer boards, including the low cost and popular Raspberry Pi, or the Keil Evaluation Board, both accessible from the Java ME SDK 3.3.
• Strong support for market-leading Embedded chip architectures: from ARMv5 through to ARMv7.
• Significant improvements for device APIs: increases the range and number of external peripherals that can be integrated and addressed by applications built on Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.3.  IO access now includes APIs for UART, ADC/DAC and AT commands, of particular relevance for wireless modules. This reduces amount of "core plumbing" that developers need to build before they can build their applications and services.
• Significant improvements in run-time monitoring (Memory Status and Network activity) and logging.
• an API to Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.3 that allow access to detailed logs, providing forensic insight into what happened at certain points of the application execution

Oracle Java ME SDK 3.3 includes:

• New support for Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit, in addition to Microsoft Windows XP 32-bit.
• Java ME SDK plug-ins for the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Eclipse, enabling more application development environments for Java ME developers.
• Emulation of external peripherals and connectivity; e.g. Java ME SDK 3.3 will emulate the wireless access point, along with peripherals such as ADC/DAC, pulse counter, and power management to expedite the time to 'code complete' and reduce the time and cost of application testing.
• In-field and remote administration and debugging.

The 2013 China Duke’s Choice Award, exclusively for China’s Java community, recognizes outstanding individuals and projects based on Java technology. After review of the nominations submitted by the Java community, Oracle is pleased to announce the winners: Zheng Ye of Moco technology of ThoughtWorks, Jia Ke for X Fantasy of Handseeing Information, and Zhang Hailong for the Java-based Web development technology of OSChina.net. The winners were honored at a banquet in Shanghai.

Here are details about the winners:

• Moco technology – Moco is a simulation server program library/tool. It aims to tackle the integration problem that has plagued the Java enterprise-level development. Moco supports API or independent operations. With API, the developers can use Moco within the test frameworks like JUnit or JBehave to greatly eliminate the complexity of integration point test. The API design of Moco is based on particular Domain Specific Language (DSL), thus enhancing the readability of code. The independent operation allows Moco to go beyond the Java platform; it can be used for front-end development to simulate a complete Web server. 

• X Fantasy – X Fantasy is a MMORPG real-time combat game running on a Web browser, which is developed with Jgnet - an advanced Java-based RIA engine. The game is user-friendly and offers a lot of fantastic features, such as stunning graphics comparable with client Web games, super-realistic attack impacts, comprehensive professions and skills, instance mode support, and group fighting, to provide players the most enjoyable fighting experience.

• Java-based Web development technology of OSChina.net – OSChina.net is a comprehensive programmer community. With the reasonable optimized configurations and cache architecture designed for business, OSChina.net creates a highly efficient and practical Java Web Service. 

"These first winners of the 2013 China Duke’s Choice Award are spear-heading a truly diverse and creative set of Java-based projects" said Peter Utzschneider, VP of product management at Oracle.

A new article, now up on otn/java, by Oracle’s Jitandra Kotamraju, titled “Java API for JSON Processing: An Introduction to JSON,” takes a look at how Java API for JSON Processing provides portable APIs to parse, generate, transform and query JSON, also known as JavaScript Object Notation. Kotamraju, a principal member of the technical staff at Oracle, is the JSON Processing specification lead.

JSO, a lightweight, text-based, language-independent data exchange format that is easy to read and write by both humans and machines, can represent two structured types: objects and arrays. Kotamraju, the JSON Processing specification lead, explains that “an object is an unordered collection of zero or more name/value pairs. An array is an ordered sequence of zero or more values. The values can be strings, numbers, booleans, null and these two structured types.”

JSON is frequently used in Ajax applications, configurations, databases, and RESTful web services. JSON is offered as the data exchange format with their RESTful web services by all popular websites.

Kotamraju gets under the hood with both the object model and streaming APIs. He concludes that the API for JSON Processing offers the following capabilities:
* “Parsing input streams into immutable objects or event streams
* Writing event streams or immutable objects to output streams
* Programmatically navigating immutable objects
* Programmatically building immutable objects with builders”

The API forms a base for building data binding, transformation, querying, or other manipulation APIs. JAX-RS 2.0 provides native integration for the Java API for JSON Processing.

Check out the article here.