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435

— At this moment in the Java world, it looks fairly gloomy and desolate out there. There is not a lot of awful good news out there to be found. The paucity of good news seems to feel like the onset of the bubonic plague in London in the middle ages. To the majority, it can feels a lot like Java’s best days are behind it. By this I mean the Java ecosystem. However when one looks for this doom and gloom there is lack real information on any news site.

In other words the changes are all emotional. They are human. It is about the faith and the belief that there will be a change of direction. Who can the change? Who is responsible for it? o you want to change? Or would prefer to follow other folks who are seen to making the change?

The changes that we have psychologically seen can paint an all together dispirited, fatigued, broken post modern Java world. I believe this is a time of darkness where indeed the meek are the meek and they have not got quite the balls to take of the world.  The darkness of the Java ecosystem relates to the following:

• Oracle taking over Java’s stewardship after the Sun Microsystem’s business model failed to drive profit
• The apparent lack of progress to improve on Java SE technology after version 6. Itself the vital trigger that made many to find a different road vis-a-vis alternative JVM languages or leave the JVM platform altogether
• Increase rhetoric of talking down Java
• Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt spread by competitors to Java, the JVM
• Misunderstandings of the platform architecture of Java, the JVM and runtime libraries
• Oracle’s lack of experience talking to the community at large
• Entropy and the increasing distance between Java special interest groups
• Fragmentation of Java communities in to tablet, mobile, standard edition and enterprise edition
• Excitement and maturity of the platform, Java is no longer the shiny new development, it is a growing spotty face teenager
• Technical leadership failure within the Java community
• Technical debt in the legacy Java production environments, architecture and systems that prevent new adoption of ideas, languages and products. There is an overall support cost in existing systems
• Difficulty of predicting the actual return of investment that leads to lack of innovation, training and vision, failure projects
• Loss of technical and thought leaders to other communities and scientific areas

It is worth looking back at the dark side in order to consider the possibilities of the future of Java. Look past the bellowing clouds into the light.