Trends in Java

This week I'll be attending No Fluff Just Stuff: Salt Lake City edition. I last attended NFJS 3 years ago. Looking at the list of sessions and topics this year compared to 3 years ago has me thinking about trends in Java.

I'm glad to see there are a number of presentations on core Java. 3 years ago I was surprised that a Java conference featured so few topics about Java. Most surprising was a keynote by Neal Ford where he essentially claimed Java was dead (or at least dying). I don't remember all his arguments, but there were a few interesting that I'll paraphrase. He said that Java was nearly 15 years old which is typically the lifetime of a language; Java has too much ceremony and is too verbose; Java has become too complicated; the legacy of Java is the JVM and its future will be alternative languages on the JVM. I'd agree with the latter point the most.

Java is not dead no matter how hard Neal Ford wishes it was. If Java is dead, then there is a lot of software necrophilia going on. It's still the number 1 language being used for application development. At Overstock, we are heavy into Java and we are still getting a lot of mileage out of it. Senior Java developers are under extremely high demand in the Salt Lake City area.

Alternative languages on the JVM are still gaining momentum though. NFJS this year features a number of sessions on Groovy and Scala. Newcomer Clojure has a small mention. Gone from 3 years ago is JRuby. No mention of Jython either. Can we call JRuby and Jython dead? I hardly hear them talked about anymore.

Despite the strength of Groovy and Scala, I don't think they will kill Java. My prediction is that Java will commit suicide though we're likely years away from that. My guess is that at some point Oracle will realize that evolving Java is too difficult and costly and declare it end of life. The release of Java 7 has convinced me of this. Consider the timeline of previous Java releases:
1.0 (January 23, 1996)
1.1 (February 19, 1997)
1.2 (December 8, 1998)
1.3 (May 8, 2000)
1.4 (February 6, 2002)
5.0 (September 30, 2004)
6.0 (December 11, 2006)
7.0 2011???

Trends like this are hard to correct. It's a vicious cycle when big projects are continually delayed. Morale goes down, short cuts are taken and developers abandon ship. It takes drastic changes to reverse the cycle and so far it doesn't appear that has happened, though Oracle may be playing this one close to the chest. It's good to see Oracle has at least put some developers on the closures feature that was announced last year.

Despite the dreary state of Java 7, the Java community is still going strong. There are still libraries emerging that demonstrate some powerful features in the JDK that have yet to be tapped to their potential. You don't hear much about Java Instrumentation but take a look at what JMockit has done with it and you'll be pretty amazed. Likewise, you don't hear much about Annotation Processing Tool but Project Lombok has done some interesting (and slightly scary) things.

For now, I'll be attending the core Java sessions at NFJS. It's what I use today and what I expect to be using for the forseeable future. I may attend a Scala session because I've been fooling on and off with Scala, mostly because its interesting. Overall, I'm pretty excited about the sessions.