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 "Who are the most important players in the Java ecosystem?" Here's what they told us:

• Oracle is the primary contributor to the language framework. Pivotal Labs provides the Spring framework, while Lightbend provides Scala and Akka, and Red Hat has JBoss application stacks.
• The Java community is a stabilizing force for what should be in the community’s hands.
• Oracle is the primary sponsor so it plays an important role along with Red Hat with JBoss and Pivotal Labs, the current sponsor of the Spring framework. In addition, you have start-ups with Scala and Ruby.
• Oracle is the biggest player along with IBM and various open source projects.
• The Open Source community is by far the most important. A lot of large frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Apache, and Groovy are all open source with liberal licenses. These have had a tremendously beneficial impact. Groovy helped to shame into supporting functional programming. Java now has good back and forth compatibility.
• The Apache Foundation, the Maven Repository, Jenkins, JIRA, and Eclipse or IntelliJ depending on the client.
• Android, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, and Chickwata (a leading developer in Nigeria).
• Oracle. Language researchers like Scala, Kotlin, and Groovy are innovative and important extending the JVM.

Who do you see as the most important players in 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