19 minute read
Is Java Still Relevant in 2020?
from Techfastly-September
by Techfastly
What is Java - A brief history In the early 90s, the software tech domain saw the inception of two of the most influential entities that came into existence, which shaped the Software Industry as it is now. Those were the World Wide Web - www(1989) and Java(1995). There's no need for an introduction for the www. Let's talk about the latter.
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Most of us know that Java was born in Sun Microsystems lab and was designed by James Gosling. But lesser known is the fact that Java was initially intended to be the language for communicating between Consumer Electronic Devices. As the development of this language started in 1991 and progressed, the www. started to shape up into a global phenomenon. This made the Java language development team rethink the original purpose, and they shifted its focus to accommodate this new niche.
Java's popularity has not fallen ever since. It started with JDK 1.0 on January 23, 1996 and is currently on JDK 14((March 17, 2020) as we speak.
What kind of uses is Java best suited for As mentioned earlier, Java was intended to be one thing and was repurposed to be something else entirely. This might be a reason for its General Purpose Nature, and currently, Java is being used in some way in every niche domain you can think of.
The most common use cases for Java would be Android Apps, Web Applications Backend and also, High-Frequency Trading and Scientific Applications. Java versus other Languages
There are several new kids on the block now. The latest sensation is Python. Python is currently topping many of the lists where Java was the uncrowned prince for over a decade. A large share of this popularity goes to the sudden interest in AI and ML domain and its simplicity as a first programming language to learn.
Another language we can talk about is C++. Java can be considered an improvement over C++ in functionality and ease of use.
When it comes to Ruby, both Ruby and Java are object-oriented and not dynamically typed. However, like Python, Ruby is also slower than Java since it is an interpreted language - which means it needs to be compiled on runtime, which adds to the total running time.
Another comparison we hear a lot is regarding C#. Be it the case of speed or performance; both perform equally well. However, Java wins the battle since C# is platform-specific. Once the software is built - it cannot be run on all platforms like Java allows you to. Why Java is still a powerful programming language
There has been a lot of news that Java is going to be phased out soon, and that it will soon be going out of scope. But the reality differs. First of all, a vast majority of the current systems rely on Ja-
va-specific code, and it is not easy to take Java down anytime soon due to the sheer amount of software that's running on Java, especially across the Web.
The recent events regarding the surging interest in COBOL underline the fact that if a language is meeting the use case very well, it is there to stick. Though COBOL is a very old language, and it has highly specific usage in the industry, it is being popularized and promoted like nothing else by IBM as of now.
These are a couple of reasons why Java is still one of the dominant programming languages out there and a favorite for the Enterprises Worldwide. Mature and Stable
The first and foremost aspect of Java-based software that makes it a winner in the Enterprise Software domain is its Stability and Maturity. It has stood the test of time by enterprises worldwide as the backend for their enormous Tech Stack serving millions of transactions per day. Robust and Secure
The Security of Java is based on the following design principles - Sandboxing model( Code runs in a sandbox and doesn't have access to System Resources), Robust Exception handling, Bytecode check by JVM(JVM Feature), Object Access Control, Final modifier, Automatic Garbage collection, and Type safety. Large Codebase By now, there are millions and billions of lines of code written in Java, which is powering the software that we use every day. As per an estimate by Oracle, 3 billion devices run Java. Those are not going anywhere anytime soon. Even as we speak, more is being added to that repository.
Huge Community
Since the inception, there has been a steady growth in users for Java until recently. It has a huge community of veteran software engineers, and people who are getting started with the language, and both of them have their reasons to love the language.
Why investing in building Java-based DevOps teams is cost-effective
There are at least a couple of reasons why building a Java-based DevOps team is a good idea for the Enterprise.
Readily available expertise - The language has been in the Software Industry for a long time - over two decades. During that period, the industry has generated a large number of experts. It is not hard to find extremely skillful engineers who are proficient in Java because of that. And since the demand meets the supply, the cost of procuring resources also remains feasible.
Java is one of the oldest mainstream languages in use today. Thanks to this popularity, most of the tooling that would be required in a project is already available. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when we have a 4WD vehicle in hand!
There's a huge Free Open Source Software(FOSS) community for the language as well, which consists of a large number of Open Source Projects such as Apache, Spring, Guava, Netty, Jenkins, Logger, JUnit e.t.c. All your building blocks are already there, that too, for free.
Real Business Use Cases
Here are a few case studies to support the points mentioned above regarding the relevance of Java in Enterprise Environment.
Twitter - Twitter migrates core infrastructure to Java Virtual Machine and supports more than 400 million tweets a day
"Performance is one of the most important products that any service can deliver to its customers," says Robert Benson, senior director of software engineering at Twitter. "End users want Twitter to be fast so they can get real-time information. Reliability and performance are huge goals for us, and that's why part of our core strategy involves moving to the Java Virtual Machine [JVM] runtime environment. Twitter no longer has the performance issues it previously had, and that's in large part due to our moving to the JVM."
-Robert Benson, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Twitter.
Complete Case study of Twitter using Java in production - Twitter and Java
Netflix - Netflix powers through 2 billion content requests per day with Java-driven architecture
"The vast majority of the services running within our architecture are built on Java and the Java Virtual Machine [JVM]," says Andrew Glover, director of delivery engineering at Netflix. "Netflix uses a stateless architecture, so as we bring in more customers, we are able to bring up more instances relatively easily. We have thousands of Java processes running all the time. Yet as we grow, we don't have huge infrastructure challenges. We also have a lot of open-source tools that are Java-based, which makes it easy to monitor, upgrade, and scale our services."
-Andrew Glover, director of delivery engineering at Netflix
Complete Case study of Netflix using Java in production - Netflix
Safe Water Kenya - An all-Java mobile app documents Safe Water Kenya's efforts to provide clean water to rural families in remote East Africa
- Daniel Pahng, mFrontiers President.
Complete Case study of Safe Kenya Water using Java in production - Safe Water Kenya
The Current State of Java
Even in 2020, Java is still popular as a first language or if you just want to broaden your skills set. The TIOBE index still ranks Java as the most popular language. And it is going to stay on the list for a long time”.
Renju Paul Jose
All YOU NEED
The Next Generation of High-Speed Wireless Communication
What is 5G?
The super-fast Internet is just around the corner. 5G or the 5th Generation is the next-gen of the global network. 5G is here not only to give you improved and uninterrupted Internet and cellphone connections, but this will also enable better performance for various innovative activities like driverless cars, delivery drones, improved
5G TO KNOW ABOUT
A.I., and whatnot. Everything in our lives has become Smart – smartphones, smart homes, smart kitchens, smart cars, and all of them need even quicker connectivity for smooth functioning with no room for error. The Internet has reshaped our world in ways that we could never have imagined. Everything is just a snap of your fingers!
Source- oaji.net
History of 1G to 5G
1G – In the year 1979, the first Generation or 1G was launched by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Tokyo, many other countries followed suit. However, 1G suffered from some initial drawbacks like calls not being encrypted, poor network, awful sound quality, and no roaming support.
2G – 2G was launched under the GSM Standard in Finland in 1991, and it promised better structures than 1G. Calls could be better encrypted, and digital voice calls were clearer with less background noise. With some arithmetic here and there, 2G was here to revolutionize the telecom sector.
3G – NTT DoCoMo launched 3G in the year 2001. 3G brought in increased data transfer capabilities and gave rise to more video conferencing, and video streaming became easier. Even the iPhone was launched in 2007 in the era of 3G.
4G –4G took this game of streaming high-quality videos to another level. With multiple deployments in some countries as the Long Term Evolution (LTE), 4G offered unparalleled streaming of gaming services, H.D. videos, and H.Q. video 5G - 5G has brought the evolution of The Internet of Things (IoT) into our pockets and purses in the form of mobile phones. 5G is here to transform everything - our homes, our banks, our education, our healthcare, everything!
On June 13, 2018, the Santiago 3GPP Conference laid the foundation of the first international 5G standard. No company or person owns 5G, and it'll be wise to call 5G the brainchild of some of the leading mobile giants.
5G was first launched in a few American and South Korean cities in April 2019.
How is it different from 4G?
The 4G cellular system is nearly 5000 times faster than the current 3G structure, and it gives a download speed that reaches 100 Mbps. 5G has a download speed of almost 10,000 Mbps, and it can also connect 100 times more devices and gives 100 percent more coverage.
4G gives a download speed of an average of 20Mbps to download an H.D. movie that would generally take around 10 to 20 minutes to download, whereas 5G will download that same movie in an unbelievable 25 seconds with a stunning speed of 500Mbps to 1500Mbps. Not only is this a much better and faster upload and download of any video, but it is 3D/ultra-high definition videos, A.R., V.R.
2020 has promised not only twenty billion plus connection devices such as phones and computers but also captors, cars, drones, medical equipment, smart home devices, and so much more! And this is why we need 5G.
What are its advantages?
With the arrival of 5G, smart devices will become adept with improved and prompt connectivity.
For instance, your smart kitchen can connect with your smart oven through 5G to inform you about the exact cooking time needed.
Education will become more accessible. Students and teachers sitting in any part of the world can team up anytime.
Places in the most remote location will have access to better health and medical assistance. The functioning of multiple parallel services will become smoother.
5G can give you better coverage, can handle large bandwidth, Dalian connection, and low latency.
eo will be downloaded and uploaded in a whiplash. Sending data to a large number of users will become easier. Monitoring a plethora of machines and equipment connected through 5G will guarantee more efficiency without disruption or delay.
There's also a possibility that natural disasters like tsunami or an earthquake can be detected faster and earlier.
The coronavirus outbreak has pushed everyone indoors, making "social distancing" the new norm. Students, businesses, healthcare, even the number of home deliveries have been affected in some way. All of these need more robust 5G technologies in the U.S.
Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC member, said the influx of people working from home is a test for the current networks. "We're going to have a big stress test on our networks," she said. "There are a lot of potential points of stress."
Countries that are spearheading 5G
World leaders in technology like Japan, Germany, China, South Korea, the USA, England, Spain, followed by France, are theoretically ready for 5G.
"According to estimates published in an Informa Tech research paper, 5G technology could be responsible for 22.3 million jobs and $13.2 trillion of global economic output by 2035."
South Korea, China, and the United States are already leading the world in building and deploying 5G technology in various cities.
Sweden, Turkey, and Estonia are some names in the league of smaller countries with superior technology that have taken significant steps to make 5G networks commercially accessible to their citizens.
South Korea is way ahead of its counterparts and is expanding its 5G spectrum. It has already set up 5G to 85 of its cities as of January 2020. According to government officials, by 2026, around 90% of Korea's mobile users will be on a 5G.
China holds the second position after South Korea, with the deployment of 5G in 57 of its cities as of January 2020.
AT&T Inc., KT Corp, and China Mobile are some of the telecommunication giants working relentlessly to build the fifth-generation (5G) of
Controversies regarding 5G
Since its conception, planning, and execution, 5G has been the favorite child of controversies, be it the stories about its radiation transmission leading to various health hazards, or alleged espionage. Among these, the most dangerous aspect of 5G that the world is worried about and is discussing at almost every Global dais is the enormous radiation it emits.
According to some reports, 5G network frequency is extremely dangerous as it is way above the current standard and could be exponentially risky for humans. However, according to another study that counters this view,
humans emit a high amount of radiation during their lifetime. The frequency of this radiation is at least 5000 times higher than 5G. Let that sink in! Does that mean that humans are more dangerous?
Researchers opine that technology like 5G is not 'the problem.' The problem lies in the spectrum and the power it brings along. To understand this better, the closer you are to the antenna and transmitter, the higher is the power and the better connectivity you get.
Most devices transmit a very low power to have any effect on the human body. For instance, the Wi-Fi uses a spectrum band of 2.4 GHz, even the microwave at your house uses the same band. The spectrum band is the same here, but the level of power both of these uses is different. The microwave uses more power, whereas the Wi-Fi uses lesser power.
5G is promising unlimited coverage, which means developing mega infrastructures like putting more number of radio heads closer to people for better connectivity; this will send up the cost for laying such structures.
of espionage. The U.S. has banned the use of Chinese components in its 5g network, citing a probable chance of espionage.
Amidst the Covid-19 stress, the ever-existing race for dominance between the USA and China has also amplified. Supremacy in the 5G revolution has become the absolute goal of the two superpowers, to the extent that the U.S. has banned the use of Chinese components in its 5g network, citing a probable chance of espionage.
Recently, the U.S. even blocked Huawei Technologies, which is a leading 5G gear supplier.
What is beyond 5G?
What lies beyond 5G is up for debate, discussion, more and more analysis, experiments, speculation, and the colossal funding that it needs. 6G is still theoretical, and we may also have 7G or 8G as the future looks quite promising.
5G is the next frontier that combines evolution with innovation for the entire telecommunication industry.
The top four carriers in the U.S., Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and At&T are now offering 5G. However, coverage is still limited around the U.S.
Verizon spearheaded the 5G revolution in the U.S. and, as of 2020, is offering 5G in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, and in smaller cities like Memphis, Columbus, and Grand Rapids.
The Verizon subscribers in Chicago, US have managed to get speeds of up to 1.4Gbps. This is way faster than 4G's theoretical top speed of 300Mbps.
As more and more devices connect to the Internet, 5G is the need of the hour, and is here to change people's lives”.
Niharika Choudhary
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Do you know what telemedicine is and how it can help at predicting future pandemics like COVID-19? Since we got into the severe coronavirus outbreak, people have been talking about the development of technologies that can prevent it. However, we have not seen that much about preventing future pandemics.
In December of 2019, an alert was fired by health tech Blue Dot, warning about the risk of a pandemic in China, which we now know as the coronavirus.
The company explains that the alert could only be fired due to an algorithm that collects various information from different sources, and crosses it with its database, thus being able to report possible disease outbreaks, whether existing or not.
The Blue Dot algorithm uses techniques of natural language processing and machine learning to identify the symptoms present and the number of people who present it.
"We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, small murmurs, forums, or blogs with indications of some kind of unusual event happening." according to the CEO of Blue Dot.
In fact, this is how the algorithm indicated the risk of contamination in Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo - all confirmed and were some of the first places affected by the virus outside China.
A major factor responsible for the fast spread and slow prevention of the pandemic was the nine-day delay by the World Health Organization to put the problem in evidence and take the necessary measures. Sometimes, algorithms aren't enough. You need health and medical professionals to take action as well. According to Kai-Fu-Lee, ex-president of Google China and the current president of Sinovation Ventures (Chinese venture capital investment company), we can use these algorithms and improve them to help discover new pandemics in the future.
Lee talked a lot about the topic of his participation in Brazil at Silicon Valley and said that using telemedicine to create a large database of the health of the population and that it is possible to use artifi-
"I think that in the long term, pandemic prevention will be possible with artificial intelligence," said Lee. "We will use smart clothes, known as wearables, that will produce data and send it to the cloud where it will be possible to notice anomalies early. So I hope that the next pandemic can be predicted and prevented." The idea proposed by Lee and several experts on the subject, that through telemedicine - the use of technology to monitor the health of patients from different places - whether through applications or watches with health monitoring, we can generate enough data to create a large cloud with all the information needed to predict a new pandemic. But predicting a pandemic goes beyond AI. It would be best if you had health and medical professionals take action quickly and actively work against it early on. The nine-day delay by the WHO was catastrophic and led to a much faster spread of the coronavirus. The importance of predicting the pandemic is directly linked to its prevention. The faster the diagnosis, the faster the treatment or isolation will be. Several researchers claim that this will be the last major global pandemic if we direct technology to this research. With the information generated, unique genetic sequencing algorithms can be created for each person in the world, being able to personalize treatments "Doctors cannot digest complete genetic sequencing, but artificial intelligence can." say the experts.
If you really can't imagine this ideal world of algorithms, try to imagine the following:
You acquire a watch that monitors your heartbeat and body temperature. Every time it peaks or goes down drastically, the watch triggers an alert and redirects you to a diagnostic application.
Within the application, you should answer a simple questionnaire about your symptoms. If the algorithm diagnoses some risk, it asks you to redirect to a health center. Otherwise, the application understands that it may have been a common change due to some other factor. This is already somewhat a reality, think about the new Apple Watch. It can monitor heart rate fairly well in older people. However, further research and development needs to be done to perfect this.
The system would have two main benefits:
z
z Diagnose possible health problems, and redirect you to service as soon as possible. Create a database with the symptoms and health monitoring of the world population, so that it identifies patterns and indicates epicenters of diseases.
As we can see, Artificial Intelligence plays a vital role in our daily lives, and even more so in matters of public health. We can and must use it for our well-being.
The current pandemic of COVID-19 has led us to global economic catastrophes, and the deaths of thousands of people in all countries. It is difficult to say whether our planet Earth could withstand yet another great outbreak like this.
Several researchers have developed studies of algorithms in disease forecast and prevention, so this can be the last pandemic experienced by us. In addition to it, companies around the world have invested high capital to finance this idea.
It is not possible to say with a hundred percent certainty that this idea is perfect, and in fact, it probably is not. However, the big question raised in this article is: how we must use technology and improve it to our advantage? As much as it does not work exactly as we expect, we will undoubtedly have a better scenario than the previous one.
If Artificial Intelligence can save us from losing 400,000 lives, do you think it's worth a try?
