Hi all, It’s been an amazing year for Java/JVM developers!

For me its been a year of fine tuning the Adopt OpenJDK and Adopt a JSR programmes with the LJC and working hard at jClarity – The Java/JVM performance analysis company that I’ve now been demoted to CEO of ;-).

In terms of the overall ecosystem there’s been some great steps forward:

1. The language and platform continues to evolve (e.g. Java 8 is looking in great shape!).
2. The standards body continues to become more inclusive and open (e.g. More Java User Groups have joined the Executive Committee of the JCP).
3. The community continues to thrive (record numbers of conferences, Java User Groups and GitHub commits).

As is traditional, I’ll try and take you through some of the trends of the past year that was and a small peek into the future as well.

2013 Trends

There were some major trends in the Java/JVM and software development arena in 2013. Mobile Apps have become the norm, virtualised infrastructure is everywhere and of course Java is still growing faster (in absolute terms) than any other language out there except for Javascript. Here are some other trends worth noting.

Functional Programming

Mainstream Java developers have adopted Scala, Groovy, Clojure and other JVM languages to write safer, more concise code for call back handlers, filters, reduces and a host of other operations on collections and event handlers. A massive wave of developers will of course embrace Java 8 and Lambdas when it comes out in early 2014.

Java moving beyond traditional web apps

In 2013 Java firmly entrenched itself into areas of software development outside of the traditional 3-tier web application. It is used realm of NoSQL (e.g. Hadoop), High performance Messaging systems (e.g. LMAX Disruptor), Polyglot Actor-Like Application Frameworks (e.g. Vert.x) and much much more.

HTML 5

2013 has started to see the slow decline of Java/JVM serverside templating systems as the rise of Javascript libraries and micro frameworks (e.g. AngularJS, Twitter Bootstrap) means that developers can finally have a client side tempalting framework that doesn’t suck and has real data binding to JSON/XML messages going to and from the browser. Websockets and asynchronous messaging are also nicely taken care of by the likes of SockJS.

2014+ – The Future

Java 8 – Lambdas

More than enough has been written about these, so I’ll offer up a practical tutorial and the pragmatic Java 8 Lambdas Book for 2014 that you should be buying!

Java 9/10 – VM improvements

Java 9 and 10 are unlikely to bring many changes to the language itself, apart from applying Java 7 and 8 features to the internal APIs, making the overall Java API a much more pleasant experience to use.

So what is coming? Well the first likely major feature will be some sort of packed object or value type representation. This is where you will be able to defined a Java ‘object’ as being purely a data type. What do I mean by this? Well it means that the ‘object’ will be able to be laid out in memory very efficiently and not have the overhead of hashCode, equals or other regalia that comes with being a Java Object. Think of it a little bit like a C/C++ struct. Here’s an example of what it might look like in source code:

@Packed
final class PackedPoint extends PackedObject {
   int x, y;
}

And the native representation:

// Native representation
struct Point {
   int x, y;
}

There are loads of performance advantages to this, especially for immutable, well defined data structures such as points on a graph or within a 3D model. The JVM will be able to use far more efficient housekeeping mechanisms with respects to Memory Layout, Lookups, JIT and Garbage Collection.

Some sort of Reified generics will also come into the picture, but it’s more likely to be an extension of the work done of the ‘packed object’ idea and removing the need to unnecessary overhead in maintaining and the manipulation of collections that use the Object representation of primitives (e.g. List).

Java 9/10 – ME/SE convergence

It was very clear at JavaOne this year that Oracle are going to try and make Java a player in the IoT space. The opportunuites are endless, but the JVM has some way to go to find the right balance bewtwen being able to work on really small decvices (which is where Java ME and CDLC sit today) and providing a rich language features and a full stack for Java developers (which is where Java SE and EE sit today).

The merger between ME and SE begins in earnest for Java 8 and will hopefully be completed by Java 9. I encourage all of oyu to try out early versions of this on your Raspberry Pi!

But wait there’s more!

The way Java itself is being build and maintained is changing itself with a move towards more open development at OpenJDK. Features such as Tail Call Recursion and Co-routines are being discussed and there is a port on the way to have Java natively work on graphics cards.

There’s plenty to challenge yourself with and also have a lot of fun in 2014! Me? I’m going to try and get Java running on my Pi and maybe build that AngularJS front end for controlling hardware in my house…..

Happy Holidays everyone!

Martijn (@karianna) Java Champion, Speaker, Author, Cat Herder etc

Meta: 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!

Author: Martijn Verburg

The Diabolical Developer, CEO – jClarity, London JUG co-leader (LJC), Speaker, Author, Javaranch Mod, PCGen & Adopt OpenJDK / A-JSR Cat herder, Java Champion

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