JAVA is Back! Date:   Wednesday , June 08, 2011 In 2009, when software giant Oracle announced its plans of acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the biggest question in everyone’s mind especially the developer community was “Will Oracle kill Java?” Oracle has forever been the quintessential software company while Sun with its huge portfolio of hardware solutions and Java has supported open source. Definitely this acquisition raised eyebrows about the clash in interests. The last few years several questions have haunted the Java developer community — Will Oracle let Java be open? Will it use its control over Java to favor its own products? And, finally, which Java technologies will be killed off after the merger? But let’s face the truth. In the last five years, Java did suffer under Sun’s hold. The company has long struggled to keep its diverse community of developers happy, creating a burdensome bureaucracy to manage the development of Java standards and gradually releasing key components of the platform under an open-source license. While Sun has made some money from Java licenses, it has missed out on big opportunities to sell lucrative Java development tools and middleware servers. More upsetting is the fact that the last major update for Java was released in 2006. Sun remains, at its heart, a hardware company; Oracle, an enterprise software giant! But eighteen months after it took control of Sun, Oracle has come forth and spilled the beans over Java’s fate! At the Oracle Develop and Java One conference held in Hyderabad between 11 and 12 May, 2011, the enterprise giant put the various rumors to rest and assured the developer community that Java is out there for the long haul and that it has a well etched role in the company’s roadmap. The company’s first ever JavaOne conference in India saw a participation of more than 2000 developers. The fact that the event was held along with OracleDevelop reinstated the developer community’s faith in the new management and future of Java. The good news is that Java is back! After a long hiatus of over five years, the heads of the Java development group announced the major developments, release of new features and updates to the entire spectrum of Java. “Being a Java veteran myself, I see a lot of positives for Java in the coming years. The first major update we will release is for JavaFx which is a competition to Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. Until now a Java developer had to learn the JavaFx separately since it was not based on core Java language. This would not be the case anymore. App development will be much easier now with Java being the primary language, availability of over 50 UI controls and charts, a pipeline of high performance graphics, high-fidelity media, ability to render HTML content within Java applications through a programming model that combines the power of Java with the ease of JavaFX and operability across different platforms like servers, desktops, mobiles and more. The public beta for this would be available by early next month,” said Nandini Ramani, Vice President - Java Client Development, Oracle. With stronger integration with the JRE, one can look forward to better performance, usability and a hardware-accelerated graphics engine that will enable JavaFX applications to render stunning interactive 2D and 3D experiences in real-time. There was also an announcement of the roadmap for the OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) which accelerates the availability of Java SE with two releases — in 2011 and 2012 respectively, was meant to assure Java developers of Oracle’s commitment to bring Java releases to a more metronomic rhythm after a few years of irregular releases in the last few years under Sun. These OpenJDK releases will continue to serve as the basis for the Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 and JDK 8. There was also the announcement for JDK 9, details of which would be released towards the end of this year. Every major change made to JavaSE has been done with a long term perspective of minimum 20 plus years and the strategies include driving a combined investment in Java platform across a range of servers and devices, fueling further innovation on various Java platforms, and continuing to support the developer community. Another major update has gone into JavaME, its platform for mobile phones. Over 3 billion phones around the world today run on Java. The number of Java based phones shipped every year is 31 times more than the combined number of Apple and Android phones shipped. Today, there are over 45000 Java based mobile applications available for people to use. “With such a strong dominance in the mobile market, we are looking bringing some updates to JavaME such as modernization of the platform, integration with Web technologies, bringing in high performance, powering VAS in Java mobile stack, easy on device access to popular app stores and more,” said Param Singh, Senior Director - Java Product Development, Oracle. Several companies such as TCS demonstrated their applications such as mKRISHI and GappaGoshti built on JavaME to empower rural areas. The Java mobile roadmap for next quarter includes utilizing Java’s dominance in the device space. Over 1.1 billion desktops run Java, over 8 billion Java cards are used across the globe today and 1.4 billion Java Cards manufactured each year. With its presence in SIM cards, identity cards and other devices like Java embedded TVs, Blue-Ray players, the future looks promising. Giving a third party perspective to the new developments underlined for Java, Harshad Oak, founder of IndicThreads & Rightrix Solutions and India’s first Java Champion and an Oracle Ace director, said, "Having involved with Oracle and Java before and after the acquisition, I see a promising outlook for Java in the coming years and encourage the developer community to openly embrace the changes. The advent of Android has been a booster shot for Java, so apart from feature phones; it can actively be used for building apps on smartphones as well. The revamped JavaFx too shows lots of promise especially with its promising capability to seamlessly produce HTML5 output. I would personally advice developers to focus on Java for mobile and cloud computing." But the best of the news for the developer community was brought by Amit Zaveri, Vice President, Product Management (Oracle Fusion Middleware) —availability Oracle App Development Framework (ADF) for developers for free. With Rich Internet Application (RIA) being the demand for the day at user end, ADF with over 150 AJAX enabled components, declarative look and feel, built in accessibility, internalization and advanced functionality and the easy integration of RIA without having to code it and a special SADF avatar will now fuel every developers programming quotient! Apart for all this, the two day conference also saw several other speakers such as Hal Stern, CTO of Juniper Networks who delivered the opening keynote and talked about Java’s ubiquitous nature when it came to smart networks and how developers can further leverage on it to solve the next level of challenges in networking. So coming back to the fate of Java, "Oh yes! Java is back and that too with a bang!"