Java legacy, II

A propósito de las afirmaciones sobre la declinación de Java, mayores hacia inicios de año que ahora, Martijn Verburg, en su revista de Java para 2012, se refiere al tema y lo refuta claramente:

The community continues to thrive despite many main stream tech media reports of ‘developers leaving the Java platform’ or ‘Java is dead’. There are more Java User Groups (JUGs) than ever before, consisting of ~400,000 developers world wide.
Notably, one of them, the London Java Community won several awards including the Duke’s Choice award and JCP Member of the Year (along with SouJava – the major Brazilian JUG).
The conference circuit is bursting at the seams with large, sold out in advance, world-class Java conferences such as JFokus, Devoxx and of course JavaOne. In addition to this the host of regional conferences that often pack in an audience of over 1000 people all continued to do well.
Oracle’s Java Magazine was launched and has grown to over 100,000 subscribers. Stalwarts like JaxEnter, Coderanch and the Javaposse continue to grow in audience sizes.

OpenJDK

Further OpenJDK reforms happened over 2012 and a new scorecard is now in place for the wider community to give feedback on governance, openness and transparency.
2012 also saw a record number of individuals and organisations joining OpenJDK. In particular, the port to the ARM processor and support for running Java on graphic cards (Project Sumatra) were highlights this year.

Java Community Process (JCP)

The Java Community Process (JCP), Java’s standards body also continued its revival with record numbers of new sign-ups and a hotly contested election. As well as dealing with the important business of trademarks, IP and licensing for Java, a re-focus on the technical aspects for Java Specification Requests (JSRs) occurred. In particular the new Adopt a JSR programme is being strongly supported by the JCP.

Java and the JVM

The JVM continues to improve rapidly through OpenJDK – the number of Java Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) going into Java 8 is enormous. Jigsaw dropping out was a disappointing but given the lack of broader vendor support and the vast amount of technical work required, it was the correct decision.

JEE / Spring

JEE7 is moving along nicely (and will be out soon), bringing Java developers a standard way to deal with the modern web (JSON, Web Sockets, etc). Of course many developers are already using the SpringSource suite of APIs but it’s good to see advancement in the underlying specs.

Rapid Web Development

Java/JVM based rapid web development frameworks are finally gaining the recognition they deserve. Frameworks like JBoss’s SEAM, Spring Roo, Grails, Play etc all give Java developers parity with the Rails and Django crowd.

Mechanical Sympathy

A major focus of 2012 was on Mechanical Sympathy (as coined by Martin Thompson in his blog). The tide has turned, and we now have to contend with having multi-core machines and virtualised O/S’s. Java developers have had to start thinking about how Java and the JVM interacts with the underlying platform and hardware.
Performance companies like jClarity are building tooling to help developers understand this complex space, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to get those hardware manuals off the shelf again!

Y cuando Martijn se refiere a las perspectivas de 2013, la expectativa persiste, con Java 8 en deliberación. Pero mejor vea el artículo, o siga Java Code Geeks. Al menos en mi caso, encuentro usualmente excelente material práctico con ellos.