The Biggest Concerns With the Java Ecosystem

To gather insights on the state of the Java ecosystem today, we spoke to nine executives who are familiar with it. We asked these experienced Java professionals, "What’s your biggest concern with the current state of the Java ecosystem?" Here's what they told us:

• Oracle owns Java and I’m concerned with what they will try to do something going against banks – asking them to pay fees. They tried going after Google and didn’t succeed. If I’m the CEO of a bank running Java, I’m not very comfortable.
• The governance model applied to the JVM and Java language is not representing the needs of the users. It’s hard to get a definitive view until we see the standards of Java 9.
• The challenge most adopters face doesn’t compromise on software quality. Maintain strong architectural engineering principles to create efficient systems. Adopt design principles. Ensure that you adopt mature, proven frameworks, not just any that’s available.
• Java EE is getting too much attention. Most problems are addressed in the open source community with Spring and Apache. Others may be more invested in Java EE for business purposes we do not see.
• Consistently late delivering on product releases and a lack of transparency into the process.
• Practicality. Clients don’t want to repeat doing the same work for iOS and Android.
• The complexity of the ecosystem and libraries not being kept up to date with regards to security vulnerabilities.
• Lack of mentors. New languages, like Kotlin, are building on Java’s vulnerabilities.
• The fragmentation between competing JDKs and JVM – Oracle versus IBM. There are significant differences that can prevent something developed for Oracle to run on IBM. The underlying implementations are not close and it makes it difficult to run enterprise software.

What's your biggest concern with the current state of the Java ecosystem?

And in case you're wondering, here's who we talked to:

• Kehinde Ogunde, Developer, Andela
• Eric Shapiro, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, ArcTouch
• Prem Chandrasekaran, V.P. of Software Engineering, Barclaycard
• Rajiv Kadayam, Senior Director of Technology Strategy, eGlobalTech
• Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
• Ray Augé, Senior Software Architect, Liferay
• Wayne Citrin, CTO, JNBridge
• Kunal Anand, CTO, Prevoty
• Tim Jarrett, Director of Product Management, Veracode