A New Year’s Declaration

2010 is going to be a big year for modularity on the Java platform. So based on recent industry trends, and as momentum continues to build around modularity on the Java platform:

I hereby officially declare 2010 as the year of modularity on the Java platform.

So that’s a relatively silly statement, and I really don’t have any authority to make such sweeping declarations. But the statement is backed by some pretty serious trends. Here are a few nuggets to chew on that has led me to believe modularity is going to be bigger in 2010 than ever before!

Between 2007 and 2009, we saw amazing momentum build around OSGi. GlassFish, Jetty, Spring DM, SpringSource dm Server, Paremus Infiniflow, Nimble, PAX, Sigil, Aries, WebSphere, JBoss, Maven, and of course Eclipse are just a few products that leverage OSGi. The list goes on. The number of 3rd party frameworks that have been “osgi-ified” has also grown substantially. And whether you love it or hate it, let’s not forget about Jigsaw and JSR-294.

But there has been a nagging problem…an elephant in the room you might say…that’s hindered widespread adoption. Without gluing together a platform, assembling it yourself, or adopting an entirely new platform, aside from the vendors who were already exposing the virtues of OSGi in their products, the majority of enterprise developers were unable to leverage any of it to build modular enterprise applications! But in 2010, that’s all going to change.

Modularity is coming to the enterprise and you’re going to be able to use it to build modular applications. IBM has already made this announcement. I suspect others will follow suit. For those using SpringSource dm Server or Infiniflow, you’re probably already doing it. With the major platform vendors showing their support for a technology that’s already embedded in products such as dm Server and Infiniflow, I suspect these platforms will see an increase in market penetration through 2010 and beyond. And I suspect you can expect some big announcements surrounding these products soon. Finally, let’s not forget, if it can avoid another delay, JDK 7 (with support for modularity) will be released in September.

Whereas prior to 2010, enterprise developers could only dream about building modular applications (or work very hard to do so), modularity is going to take center stage. And since modularity lies at the heart of the platform, it doesn’t matter what language you use. Neil showed us how to do it with Scala way back in 2007. And Groovy does OSGi, as does Clojure. Yep, so does Scala. So no matter which language you use, you’ll be able to take advantage of modularity on the Java platform.

In 2010 modularity on the Java platform is going to be a game changer…a disruptor…that reaches from the developer to the data center. As 2010 progresses, more and more developers will be touched by modularity. It’s not something we should ignore. Really, it’s not something we can ignore anymore.

From http://techdistrict.kirkk.com