Happy new year! I hope you had a fun/restful/productive (delete as appropriate) festive season, if applicable. January’s Annotated Monthly is a gentle introduction to 2017 with a summary of the state of Java and the community, and an overview of some of the key technology trends from 2016.

State of Java

As 2016 ended there were some great summaries of the key trends and some nice reminders of good Java coding. It’s clear Java is still one of the most popular languages, that despite delays, Java 9 is eagerly anticipated, and that the future of Java-the-language is bright. Despite there being some confusion around licensing at the tail end of the year, this has been addressed by various groups.

There has, however, been doubt about the future of Java EE, but talk of the demise of Java EE is strongly denied by the community, and Oracle itself has responded to current architectural trends and desires, have asked the community what they want, and is redirecting Java EE 8 development accordingly. The community has shown that it’s not dependent upon the steward of Java, spawning its own guardians and solutions.

Technology Trends

At the start of 2016, we had a much better view of why microservices matter, and during the year, microservices has moved along the adoption curve (you always know this is happening when people start asking things like “What comes after microservices (video)“).

Containers must also be climbing the adoption curve, since next year’s conferences are asking the question “Is Docker Dead?” The container technology market is getting crowded, but the good news is that we’re able to learn from other people’s experiences.

Serverless is another one of those buzzwords commonly appearing in articles and conferences. It may seem that this trend doesn’t apply to Java developers, but think again.

Reactive Programming has become so mainstream it’s going to be integrated into Java 9. We’ve covered Reactive in the last two Java Annotated Monthlies.

JavaScript continues to evolve and confuse, and it’s not going away anytime soon. If you’ve managed to avoid it as a Java programmer so far, you might be interested in this overview of the state of JavaScript in 2016.

And Finally…

Since the last Java Annotated, the IntelliJ IDEA blog has been busy announcing quite a few interesting things. So in case you missed them:

• It feels like we’ve only just released 2016.3, but it’s already onwards and upwards – the 2017.1 EAP is open.
• There’s a new plugin that lets you pick up some top tips for working with the IDE. I’ve been playing with it and it’s a nice way to ingrain some muscle memory for the most productive keyboard shortcuts.
• Don’t miss next week’s Kotlin TDD webinar with Robert Martin (Uncle Bob). It looks like it’s going to be our most popular ever!