My Blog

Category: programming languages

  • Supercharge Java on Azure with Microsoft’s “jaz” Tool

    Java has been an enterprise workhorse for decades, but its reputation in the modern cloud is often that of a powerful but heavy engine. Making traditional Java applications fast, efficient, and cost-effective in an elastic cloud environment like Azure has been a complex, manual task. Recognizing this, Microsoft is investing heavily in new tooling, and the fictional standout ‘jaz’ represents their new AI-powered approach to supercharging Java application performance.

     

    The Challenge: Making Java Truly Cloud-Native

     

    Running Java in the cloud isn’t as simple as just moving a file. Developers face several persistent challenges:

    • Slow Startups and High Memory Use: The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is famously powerful, but its “warm-up” time and memory footprint can be a major drawback for modern patterns like serverless functions and microservices, which need to start and scale instantly.
    • Complex Manual Tuning: Optimizing the JVM’s garbage collection, heap size, and thread pools—in addition to configuring the right Azure instance type—is a dark art that requires deep expertise.
    • Poor Visibility: Once an application is running in a container on Azure, it can be difficult to diagnose performance bottlenecks. Is the problem in the Java code, the database connection, or the network?

     

    Enter ‘jaz’: Your AI-Powered Performance Engineer 🚀

     

    Microsoft’s new ‘jaz’ tool is designed to solve these problems by automating the complex work of optimization. It acts as an intelligent performance engineer built directly into the Azure platform.

     

    AI-Powered Configuration

     

    ‘jaz’ uses machine learning to analyze your application’s specific workload and behavior in real-time. Based on this analysis, it provides concrete recommendations for the optimal JVM settings and Azure service configurations. This takes the guesswork out of tuning and ensures you’re not overprovisioning (and overpaying for) resources.

     

    Seamless Native Compilation

     

    One of the most powerful ways to modernize Java is to compile it into a native executable using GraalVM. Native images start almost instantly and use a fraction of the memory of a traditional JVM. ‘jaz’ deeply integrates this process, making it simple for any Java developer on Azure to build and deploy these highly efficient native applications.

     

    Cloud-Aware Profiling

     

    ‘jaz’ is a performance profiler that understands the entire cloud stack. It doesn’t just look at your Java code; it analyzes how that code interacts with Azure’s services. It can pinpoint if a slowdown is caused by an inefficient SQL query, a misconfigured message queue, or a network latency issue, giving you a holistic view of your application’s performance.

     

    The Future: Autonomous Optimization and FinOps

     

    The vision for tools like ‘jaz’ extends far beyond just making recommendations. The future is about creating fully autonomous systems that manage themselves.

    The next evolution is for ‘jaz’ to move from suggesting optimizations to safely applying them automatically in production. This turns the tool into a true agentic AI for performance engineering, constantly fine-tuning your application for maximum efficiency.

    This directly ties into financial management. Every performance improvement—faster startup, lower memory usage—translates into a smaller cloud bill. This makes intelligent performance tooling a critical component of any modern FinOps strategy. Furthermore, as the JVM ecosystem continues to embrace other modern languages like Kotlin, these tools will become essential for managing a diverse, polyglot environment, making them a key part of a developer’s future-proof skillset.

     

    Conclusion

     

    Microsoft is making it clear that Java on Azure is a first-class citizen. By developing sophisticated, AI-powered tools like ‘jaz’, they are abstracting away the deep complexities of cloud and JVM optimization. This empowers developers to focus on what they do best—building great applications—while ensuring those applications run with maximum performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in the cloud.

  • Kotlin on the Backend: The JetBrains & Spring Alliance

    For years, Kotlin has been the undisputed champion of modern Android development. But its next major conquest is the server side. Thanks to a deepening collaboration between its creators at JetBrains and the team behind the dominant Spring Framework, Kotlin is rapidly becoming a top-tier choice for building powerful, modern backend services. This alliance is making it easier than ever for developers to leverage Kotlin’s elegant features within the robust, enterprise-grade ecosystem of Spring.

     

    Why Kotlin on the Backend? The Appeal of a Modern JVM Language

     

    While Java is a reliable workhorse, many developers have been looking for a more modern alternative that still runs on the powerful and battle-tested Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Kotlin is that alternative. Its appeal for backend development comes down to a few key advantages:

    • Conciseness and Readability: Kotlin drastically reduces boilerplate code compared to traditional Java, leading to code that is cleaner, easier to read, and faster to write. Better code is a form of better technical communication.
    • Null Safety: Kotlin’s type system is designed to eliminate NullPointerExceptions, one of the most common and frustrating sources of bugs in Java applications.
    • Coroutines: Kotlin provides a simple and incredibly efficient way to handle asynchronous programming, which is essential for building responsive, high-performance web services.
    • 100% Java Interoperability: You can have Kotlin and Java code side-by-side in the same project. This allows companies to adopt Kotlin gradually without needing to rewrite their existing applications.

     

    Deeper Integration: What the JetBrains & Spring Collaboration Means 🤝

     

    While it has been possible to use Kotlin with Spring for years, the latest collaboration has elevated it from “works well” to “a truly first-class experience.” The Spring Framework team is now designing features with Kotlin in mind from the start.

     

    First-Class Support in Spring

     

    Newer versions of Spring are built to take direct advantage of Kotlin’s language features. This means less manual configuration and a more seamless development experience. The framework now understands things like Kotlin’s immutable classes and non-nullable types, automatically adapting to provide a more idiomatic feel.

     

    Expressive Kotlin DSLs

     

    Spring now offers Kotlin-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) for defining things like application routes and bean configurations. This allows developers to write configuration code that is not only type-safe but also incredibly clear and readable, almost like a declarative sentence.

     

    Optimized for the Cloud

     

    A major focus of the collaboration is ensuring that Kotlin-based Spring applications work flawlessly with GraalVM to compile into native executables. These native images have lightning-fast startup times and significantly lower memory footprints, making them perfect for serverless functions and microservices in a modern cloud environment. This is a crucial part of rethinking web architecture for the cloud.

     

    The Future: A Full-Stack Kotlin Ecosystem 🚀

     

    This deepening backend integration is part of a larger vision for a unified, full-stack Kotlin ecosystem.

    The ultimate goal for many is Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP). This technology will allow developers to share code—like data models and business logic—between their Spring backend, their Android and iOS mobile apps, and even their web frontend. This promises to dramatically reduce duplication of effort and improve consistency across an entire application suite.

    This progress is also being accelerated by smarter tooling. AI coding assistants are becoming increasingly adept at understanding the specific patterns of Kotlin with Spring, providing intelligent suggestions that further boost developer productivity. For developers, staying proficient with modern languages like Kotlin is one of the most important future-proof skills they can cultivate.

     

    Conclusion

     

    The powerful alliance between JetBrains and Spring is cementing Kotlin’s place as a premier language for backend development. By offering a safer, more concise, and more productive alternative to traditional Java, while retaining full access to the mature and powerful JVM ecosystem, Kotlin is providing a best-of-both-worlds solution for building the next generation of robust, cloud-native applications.