What’s happening with Java? A discussion with the LJC

Last week I participated as a panelist for a London Java Community hosted discussion on “What’s happening with Java”. Panelists Kate Stanley (@KateStanley91), Bruno Borges (@brunoborges) and myself answered questions around this topic. The three of us bring various perspectives including Java application development, platform development, JVM development, open source involvement and project management expertise. In this blog post I’ve highlighted some of what was discussed. You can also view the discussion on YouTube.

What was more or less popular than expected with recent Java releases?

One thing that we’ve all noticed is that Java developers are doing a great job bridging the great divide from Java 8 to 11+. From our observations as members of the Java community, there is a greater general confidence around Java 11+ features in discussions and conference talks in the last year or so. For open source projects, introducing newer Java versions no longer seems to be a skill barrier for contributors.

Those observations are reflected in the data as well. According to New Relic’s “2022 State of the Java Ecosystem”, 48.44% of Java users are now using Java 11 in production compared to 46.45% using Java 8. Just two years ago in 2020, 84.48% were still on Java 8.

Java’s container story helps make upgrading versions easier as well since Java runtimes can be shipped alongside applications and not maintained on the server. We’ll see how this impacts adoption time when the next LTS release, Java 21, comes out next year.

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Another observation is that now that the 6 month release cycle has been in place for a few years, the panel observed more discussions in general around new language and incubation features. It’s great to see the ownership the Java community feels around the (Read more...)