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AS OF 5/20/2008 2:32PM EST
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Open Java, Open Standards
Java matures, speeds up, goes open in 2007
By Alex Handy
December 26, 2007 —
Sun Microsystems has always been slow to change Java. For years, developers howled for generics and annotations, and only in the past three years did these features arrive. So too, had open source zealots been screaming for Sun to make Java into an open standard backed by open source. And finally, in 2007, almost 12 years after the creation of the language, Sun released the language's development kit and runtime environment under GPLv2.
Certainly this was the most momentous achievement in the Java world this past year. But when it comes to the actual day-to-day development of major business applications, open source Java was the last thing on anyone's mind in 2007.
Simplify, Simplify
In fact, most enterprise developers spent 2007 revising their plans and scaling back their need for overpriced, overblown Java infrastructure. With OSGi's services platform technology winding its way through the Java Community Process, and Apache Tomcat squarely in the driver's seat when it comes to Java containers, developers had a newfound simplicity in their Java baskets in 2007. While new versions of Enterprise JavaBeans and Hibernate were available even before the year started, many development shops finally found that they didn't need these over-engineered solutions to enterprise problems. And adding JRuby to the mix for a powerful and simple scripting layer on top of a JVM only helps to make Java developers' lives easier, it seems.
That may all change next year, with Java EE 6 and new types of Beans set to emerge. Thanks to the release of Java 1.6, (or Java SE 6) earlier this year, the Java world finally has a runtime environment that is polished and complete, so much so that Sun finally took some time to do performance optimization and monitoring work inside the JDK. That's only appropriate, as JDK 6 will likely be the last version to be handled entirely by Sun developers.
And how can we discuss the year in Java without mentioning the largest and most complex update ever engineered for Eclipse? Version 3.3, code-named Europa, saw more than 2 million downloads between June and the writing of this article in early December. That's certainly the most interest the project has ever gathered around a new release.
Can you blame all those downloaders? When it comes to developing Java, there are certainly many IDE choices. But when it comes to developing enterprise Java applications, Eclipse simply offers too many tools and features to ignore. From RCP tools to the powerful Mylyn project visualizer, Eclipse makes Java cheaper and easier to write.
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