The engineers at Gluon have been working hard over the past few months preparing a number of new releases, on top of their JavaFX and Java enterprise consulting that they do. In this post we will summarize what is coming up in the next few months for users of Gluon software.
Gluon VM
We announced the other day that a developer preview release of Gluon VM was available. Gluon VM enables Java 9 support on Android and iOS for the first time, and it works perfectly with Gluon Mobile for creating cross-device mobile applications in Java. We are receiving a lot of useful feedback and will be continuing to improve this software as it works towards a full release. As noted in the developer preview release announcement, it is possible to create Gluon Mobile apps that are completely based on OpenJDK 9, leveraging the same core classes as the ones used in desktop and enterprise applications. Moving forward, we plan to integrate more closely with offerings from OpenJDK, in particular, make use of the graal project to improve performance even more, and to leverage the amazing amount of work that has gone into JIT and AOT compilation in OpenJDK.
Gluon Mobile
Gluon Mobile has had a major review done on its API offering, taking into account design patterns we find ourselves and our customers using. With Gluon Mobile 5.0.0 we will ship an updated API for Glisten, our UI toolkit component, that vastly simplifies and improves the developer experience for developing cross-device mobile applications in Java. This has been a major undertaking, and although there are some breaking API changes, we have done this in a considered and minimal way, to ensure development continues to be easy and meet developers where they expect to be met.
Gluon Desktop
Gluon Desktop, our framework for building cross-platform (i.e. Windows, MacOS, and Linux) applications is in the process of receiving a complete rewrite. This is because, since creating Gluon Desktop, we developed the free / open source Gluon Ignite project to better support dependency injection in JavaFX. As with all Gluon offerings, this version will be a free upgrade to all current subscribers, and we will publish documentation on upgrading to ensure this is a smooth and rewarding process.
Gluon CloudLink
Gluon CloudLink has primarily been focusing on extending and improving its security features based on best practices in mobile security. These include improvements on both sides of the mobile chain. For instance, it is now possible to customize login methods for authenticating a user on the mobile device. We’ve also tightly coupled user authorization together with CloudLink’s remote function and data storage. This shields your backend infrastructure by adding user authorization based security. Speaking of backend infrastructure, we continue to add functionality to link with your existing infrastructure. It was already possible to integrate with any REST based backed. But we also integrate seamlessly with the following serverless function platforms: Amazon AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Functions and Fn Project. On top of that, Gluon CloudLink provides its own serverless environment to run custom functions on Java 8 or 9.
Summary
As you can see, the engineers at Gluon are working incredibly hard to ensure that we continue to offer a seamless developer experience for building mobile, desktop, and cloud applications in Java. We offer the best end-to-end solution, and are constantly improving. If you have any questions – contact us today.