The Biggest Change To Java

To gather insights on the state of the Java ecosystem today, we spoke to nine executives who are familiar with the ecosystem.

We asked these experienced Java professionals "What have been the most significant changes to the Java ecosystem in the past year?" Here's what they told us:

• Java 8 is getting a lot of adoption. People are embracing lambda expressions since it’s an open door for functional programming – less code gets more done. This reduces bugs. The work is done in frameworks. A lot less to look at. It's about getting up to speed with functional programming. Frameworks enable automation and allow people to focus on business problems versus infrastructure issues. A solid ecosystem allows you to focus on solving problems versus building infrastructure. You can turn out features quickly. Java has a head start since it’s been around so long. Java 8 rejuvenated the language. Spring Boot and the Play framework renewed enthusiasm as Java 9 will do with modularity.
• The OSGi Alliance thinks Java 9 is particularly exciting because of the promise of modularity.
• The realization of Java 8 and exploiting all its capabilities. More support for closures and functional programming languages like Scala and support for Spring with Spring Boot radically accelerating development and deployment of Java applications.
• Java 9 is exciting because of the modularity without interrupting what’s been done in earlier versions of Java. New stuff in old versions are hard to maintain legacy code. It requires messy workarounds. Java 9 seems much more user friendly in this regard but we’ll have to wait until we see the final tooling and IDEs.
• Adoption of Java 8 has happened far more quickly than other versions. The language is much nicer stream-based functional code. It has providing a reawakening for a lot of Java developers.
• Kotlin.
• Microservices and the decomposition of applications. The trends of DevOps, containerization, how developers write and deploy applications. Shift towards smaller units of functionality.
• General tooling has improved. Usability has improved. Benchmark testing has improved. Today there are a wealth of tools like JUnit and Google Juice. Performance Visual VM, JVisual VM ships with Java. We take for granted how much tooling has improved. Java 8 has improved usability.

What's the most significant change to Java in the past year from your perspective?

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