JavaOne 2011 proofs that the apparent decline of Java – as a language, a platform and a community – as been turned around into a steady growth again. Attendance numbers for JavaOne are double those of last (very poor) year. More importantly: the atmosphere is very different from last year. From last year’s fairly low spirits with fear, uncertainty and doubt and substantial dose of skepticism with regard to Oracle’s stewardship and willingness to invest in areas not (immediately) generating revenue, there now seems to be a growing confidence in Oracle’s ability to deliver on promises as well as a relieved realization that Java is rapidly evolving, catching up with current trends – multi touch UI, mobile devices and their native functions, modern programming language constructs, cloud based deployment, today’s attractive user interface design, modularization, integration with dynamic JVM languages – and is not yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s legacy.
The delivery of Java EE 6, Java 7 SE and Java FX 2.0 (GA on Windows, Preview on MacOS), the ongoing strengthening of Glassfish, the convergence of Hotspot and JRockit JVM on OpenJDK, the next steps with Java Card (3.0.4) and ME are all concrete proofs of progress. They in turn vouch for the many ambitions laid out during JavaOne:
– Java 7 EE – project initiated early 2011, completion planned for end of 2012 – with many ambitions around cloud deployment, HTML 5 and WebSockets support, new JMS 2.0 spec, increased support for RESTful services, and many more architectural improvements (note: initial Glassfish 4.0 are already available for download!)
– Java 8 SE – completion planned for Summer 2013 – with improvements from JigSaw (modularization), Lambda (closures), Date Time, a new JavaScript engine in the JVM (project Nashorn); integration of JVMs into OpenJDK; Â JavaFX 3.0 integrated into Java 8 SE
– JavaFX future plans- FX is definitely staying! Oracle continues on the investments made by Sun, to provide the next generation of Java Client technology. Multiple platforms, closer integration with SE (already started with the replacement of FX Script with the Java APIs), integration with Dynamic Languages (ScalaFX and GroovyFX); FX planned for Linux!
Adam Messinger
9 million Java Developers worldwide
more people speak Java than speak Swedish
Twitter joins both OpenJDK project and JCP!
