Java: The Road Ahead

At the recently concluded Oracle Java One developer conference held in Hyderabad on 10-11 May 2011, Oracle reinforced its committment towards Java. The software giant assured that Java was alive and kicking. With the last major releases way back in 2006, Oracle did reassure the audience by showcasing the roadmap it has in mind for the developers who have pledged their future towards the platform. With Oracle, we should soon be back to a regular cadence of releases.

Till date, the Java platform has attracted more than 6.5 million software developers with some nine million using Java regularly during the work day. In an effort to creatively integrate and optimise hardware and software, Oracle strongly supports the open source Java community, as Oracle itself has over 10,000 Java developers.

3 billion mobile phones and 1.1 billion desktops run Java, 31 times more Java phones ship every year than Apple and Android combined, while 100% of all Blu-ray players run Java. Around 1.4 billion Java cards are manufactured each year, growing at 1.7 billion devices per year. In short, Java powers set-top boxes, printers, Web cameras, games, car navigation systems, lottery terminals, medical devices, parking payment stations and more.

Steven G. Harris, Oracle's Senior VP of Application Server Development points out, “All of our middleware -- when we talk about Fusion Middleware -- is written in Java. If Java is not successful, we will fail. We really want Java to be successful, so keeping Java open, and having developers working in Java is really critical to our success.”

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, "The advent of Android has been a booster shot for Java, so apart from feature phones, it can be actively 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."

New announcements from Oracle

Oracle unveiled plans for a major thrust to take on graphics rich environments and tools like Flash and Silverlight with JavaFX. The promise was to deliver advanced graphics, high-fidelity media, and the ability to render HTML content within Java applications through a programming model that combines the power of Java with the ease of JavaFX.JavaFX would be tightly integrated with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to enable better performance and improved 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. These OpenJDK releases will continue to serve as the basis for the Oracle Java Development Kits, 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.

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 45,000 Java-based mobile applications available for people to use. “With such a strong dominance in the mobile market, we are 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. 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.