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On Sunday evening, Oct. 2, at the JavaOne Open House, Oracle welcomed and celebrated the 2011 Duke's Choice Award winners, all talented developers who have demonstrated extreme innovation in the creation of Java-powered applications.

Drum roll: And the winners are...

• Arquillian Project - The Arquillian project simplifies integration testing for Java-based applications. It provides an easy mechanism for developers to test application code inside a remote or embedded container, or by interacting as a client of the container.

• dooApp - Infiltrea is an end-to-end solution, built with JavaFX and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), designed for green building professionals whose job is to measure the air tightness of buildings.

• Inductive Automation - Ignition is a Java-based web application that includes a business scorecard to integrate different manufacturing machines using a central web-server. It creates systems that cover the full spectrum between Human Machine Interface (HMI), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES), enabling rapid project development and deployment.

• Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) jHome - A complete home automation API open-source for Glassfish/Java EE, enabling developers to control anything in their homes such as lamps, LED lights, and coffee machines.

• JFrog - JFrog's Artifactory is the world's first binary repository manager. Built with the Content Repository API for Java (JCR) specification, it is helping to change the way developers build and manage software modules by delivering high concurrency and unmatched data integrity.

• JRebel - JRebel is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) plug-in that enables Java developers to instantly see any code change made to an application. It allows developers to skip the build and redeploy phases and has prevented 39 million redeploys.

• LMAX - The LMAX Disruptor is a multi-threaded, open-source concurrent programming framework designed for high-performance and low-latency transaction processing. Part of LMAX's Java-based trading platform, the LMAX Disruptor replaces and outperforms java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue by up to 80 times.

• Rockwell Automation - Rockwell Automation is creating its next generation, Java-enabled HMI device line of products that will allow for the automated communication and exchange of data to factory floor lines.

• Sodbeans Project - The Sodbeans Project is an open-source, NetBeans-based module suite designed to enhance accessibility for the blind in modern programming environments. The NetBeans module suite includes a new programming language designed for ease-of-use, a text-to-speech engine designed to make NetBeans compatible with screen readers on multiple platforms and a number of features designed to make programming easier for the blind.

• The Netty Project - The Netty Project is a Java-based new I/O (NIO) client server framework that enables quick and easy development of network applications. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server.

Congratulations to all!

A new article by systems architect Manfred Riem, now up on otn/java, titled “Working with Java SE 7 Exception Changes,” covers important developments in Java 7’s Project Coin, focusing on exception handling -- specifically multi-catch, rethrow, and try-with-resources. Project Coin consists of the following small language changes, which are intended to simplify common programming tasks: strings in switch statements; better integral literals; multi-catch exceptions; improved type inference for generic instance creation; try-with-resources; and simplified varargs method invocation.

From the article itself:

“The exception handling changes in Java SE 7 allow you not only to program more concisely, as demonstrated in the multi-catch examples, but they also allow you to partially handle an exception and then let it bubble up, as covered in the re-throw examples. Java SE 7 also facilitates less error-prone exception cleanup…”

Read the complete article here.

A very clear and detailed article by Julien Ponge, titled “Better Resource Management with Java SE 7: Beyond Syntactic Sugar,” presents the Java 7 answer to the automatic resource management problem in the form of a new language construct, proposed as part of Project Coin, called the try-with-resources statement.

Java applications frequently manipulate different types of resources such as files, streams, sockets, and database connections that require system resources for their operations. They must be managed with great care or risk having database connections and file descriptors remain open after an exception occurs elsewhere in the code. As a result, application servers may need frequent restarts due to resource exhaustion.

The article provides an overview of resource and exception management before explaining the essentials of try-with-resources statements. It then shows how a class can be made ready to support such statements, and concludes with a demystification of the syntactic sugar behind the language extension.

Ponge concludes that the try-with-resources construct “generates correct code on behalf of the developer, eliminating the need to write boilerplate code that is easy to get wrong. More importantly, this change has been accompanied with evolutions to attach one exception to another, thus providing an elegant solution to the well-known problem of exceptions masking each other.”

Read the rest of the article here.