Important Elements of the Java Ecosystem Today

To understand the current and future state of the Java Ecosystem, we reached out to our community for their insights. Unlike other topics like containers and security, there are far fewer people willing to share their thoughts on the current and future state of Java. This appears to be a function of its maturity relative to other technologies.

We are grateful to our three contributors who all have significant experience with Java:

• Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
• Erik Costlow, Principal Product Evangelist, Contrast Security
• Mark Little, V.P. Middleware Engineering, Red Hat

We asked them, "What do you consider to be the most important elements of the Java Ecosystem?" Here's what they told us:

• Since Sun kicked off OpenJDK and Oracle’s acquisition, they’re running with it. Since then, we've seen the adoption of open-source principles within the Java language and moving to the Eclipse Foundation. There is huge community adoption, low barrier to entry, nice frameworks, and toolsets. All of these have driven massive adoption of Java.
• The most prominent is Oracle's maneuver to start charging for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) that resulted in the wholesale abandonment of the JRE to others that have popped up around the OpenJDK effort. Enterprises are trying to figure out what to use instead transitioning away from Oracle to one of the other JREs that have popped up.
• The two most important items are pervasiveness and compatibility, which work hand-in-hand. From the very beginning of Java as Project Oak, the mantra was “write once, run anywhere.” When you look, Java is available on all laptops, desktops, servers, cloud systems, and some embedded devices. With the work that Gluon does, it is also available on mobile phones again. This works because the code is compatible and doesn’t need to be continually recompiled or changed.