The Java Ecosystem – My top 5 highlights of 2014

1. February the 1st – RedMonk Analyst firm declares that Java is more popular & diverse than ever!

The Java Ecosystem started off with a hiss and a roar in 2014 with the annual meeting of the Free Java room at FOSDEM. As well as the many fine deep technical talks on OpenJDK and related topics there was also a surprise presentation on the industry from Steve O’Grady (RedMonk Analyst). Steve gave a data lead insight into where Java ranked in terms of both popularity and scope at the start of 2014. The analysis on where Java is as a language is repeated on RedMonk’s Blog. The fact it remains a top two language didn’t surprise anyone, but it was the other angle that really surprised even those of us heavily involved in the ecosystem. Steve’s talk clearly showed that Java is aggressively diverse, appearing in industries such as social media, messaging, gaming, mobile, virtualisation, build systems and many more, not just Enterprise apps that people most commonly think about. Steve also showed that Java is being used heavily in new projects (across all of those industry sectors) which certainly killed the myth of Java being a legacy enterprise platform.

2. March the 18th – Java 8 arrives

The arrival of Java 8 ushered in a new Functional/OO hybrid direction for the language giving it a new lease of life. The adoption rates have been incredible (See Typesafe’s full report on this) it was clearly the release that Java developers were waiting for.

Some extra thoughts around the highlights of this release:

• Lambdas (JSR 335) – There has been so much written about this topic already with a ton of fantastic books and tutorials to boot. For me the clear benefit to most Java developers was that they’re finally able to express the correct intent of behaviour with collections without all of the unnecessary boiler plate that imperative/OO constructs forced upon them. It boils down to the old adage of That there are only two problems in computer science, cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. The new streams API for collection in conjunction with Lambdas certainly helps with the last two!
• Project Nashorn (JSR 223, JEP 174) – The JavaScript runtime which allows developers to embed JavaScript code within their Java applications. Although I personally won’t be using this anytime soon, it was yet another boost to the JVM in terms of first class support for dynamically typed languages. I’m looking forward to this trend continuing!
• Date and Time API (JSR 310, JEP 150) – This is sort of bread and butter API that a blue collar language like Java just needs to get right, and this time (take 3) they did! It’s been great to finally be able to work with timezones correctly and it also set a new precedence of Immutable First as a conscious design decision for new APIs in Java.

3. ~July – ARM 64 port (AArch64)

RedHat have lead the effort to get the ARMv8 64-bit architecture supported in Java. This is clearly an important step to keep Java truly “Run anywhere” and alongside SAP’s PowerPC/AIX port represents two major ports that are primarily maintained by non-Oracle participants in OpenJDK. If you’d like to help get involved see the project page for more details.

Java still has a way to go before becoming a major player in the embedded space, but the signs in 2014 were encouraging with Java SE Embedded featuring regularly on the Raspberry Pi and Java ME Embedded getting a much needed feature parity boost with Java SE APIs.

4. Sept/Oct – A Resurgence in the JCP & it’s 15th Anniversary

The Java Community Process (JCP) is the standards body that defines what goes into Java SE, Java EE and the Java ME. It re-invented itself as a much more open community based organisation in 2013 and continued that good work in 2014, reversing the dropping membership trend. Most importantly – it now truly represents the incredible diversity that the Java ecosystem has. You can see the make up of the existing Executive Committee – you can see that institutions like Java User Groups sitting alongside industry and end user heavyweights such as IBM, Twitter and Goldman Sachs.

Community Collaboration at an all time high & Microsoft joins OpenJDK.

The number of new joiners to OpenJDK (see Mani’s excellent post on this) was higher than ever. OpenJDK now represents a huge melting pot of major tech companies such as Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Twitter and of course the shock entry this year of Microsoft.

The Adopt a JSR and Adopt OpenJDK programmes continue to bring more day to day developers involved in guiding the future of various APIs with regular workshops now being organised globally around the world to test new APis and ideas out early and feed that back in OpenJDK and the Java EE specifications in particular.

Community conferences & the number of Java User Groups continue rise in numbers, JavaOne in particular having it’s strongest year in recent memory. It was also heartening to see a large number of community efforts helping kids learn to code with after school and weekend programmes such as Devoxx for Kids.

What for 2015?

I’ll expect 2015 to be a little bit quieter in terms of changes for the core language or exciting new features to Java EE or Java ME as their next major releases aren’t due to 2016. On the community etc front I expect to see Java developers having to firmly embrace web/UI technologies such as AngularJS, More systems/Devops toolchains such as Docker, AWS, Puppet etc and of course migrate to Java 8 and all of the functional goodness it now brings! The community I’m sure will continue to thrive and the looming spectre of IoT will start to come into the mainstream as well. Java developers will likely have to wait until Java 9 to get a truly first class platform for embedded, but early adopters will want to begin taking a look at early builds throughout 2015. Java/JVM applications now tend to be complex, with many moving parts and distributed deployments. It can often take poor frustrated developers weeks to fix issues in production. To combat this there are a new wave of interesting analysis tools dealing with Java/JVM based applications and deployments. Oracle’s Mission Control is a powerful tool that can give lots of interesting insights into the JVM and other tools like Xrebel from ZeroTurnaround, jClarity’s Censum and Illuminate take the next step of applying machine learned analysis to the raw numbers. One final important note. Project Jigsaw is the modularisation story for Java 9 that will massively impact tool vendors and day to day developers alike. The community at large needs your help to help test out early builds of Java 9 and to help OpenJDK developers and tool vendors ensure that IDEs, build tools and applications are ready for this important change. You can join us in the Adoption Group at OpenJDK: http://adoptopenjdk.java.net I hope everyone has a great holiday break – I look forward to seeing the Twitter feeds and the GitHub commits flying around in 2015 :-).
Cheers,
Martijn (CEO – jClarity, Java Champion & Diabolical Developer)

This post is part of the Java Advent Calendar and is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. If you like it, please spread the word by sharing, tweeting, FB, G+ and so on!