Java is a programming language and platform for developing and running software, released in 1995 by Sun Microsystems after the work by its creator, James Gosling, and his team. It was unique for its ability to be compiled to bytecode and executed on any platform that had a Java Virtual Machine runtime — giving birth to the phrase, “write once, run anywhere.”
The term ‘Java’ consists of the Java language, the Java Standard Edition (SE) that is the base platform for running Java programs, and the Java Enterprise Edition for large distributed environments. Java SE is overseen by Oracle Corp., which purchased Sun, while Java EE has been turned over to the Eclipse Foundation as steward.
Java comes with a core set of libraries and packages that remove many of the down-in-the-weeds hurdles developers had to clear to get their applications running. Java 11 is the most recent long-term support release of the language. Among the top Java development environments today are the OpenJDK, IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans. Among the popular frameworks around Java is Spring.
Oracle has announced the release of Java 23, which contains a number of new language and library features, mostly in preview stages. According to Chad Arimura, VP of developer relations at Oracle, the fact that most of the JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) in this release are previews of what’s to come rather than stable features … continue reading
The Eclipse Foundation has just announced its largest release ever of Eclipse Temurin, which is an open source build of Java based on OpenJDK, otherwise known as Eclipse Adoptium. The new release supports 54 different platform and version combinations and five major versions of OpenJDK. According to the Eclipse Foundation, this flexibility highlights the organization’s … continue reading
Java 17, a Long-Term Support (LTS) version released in 2021, has finally surpassed Java 11 as the most used version of Java in production. This is according to New Relic’s annual State of the Java Ecosystem report, which documents recent trends in the Java community based on monitoring the Java applications connected to its platform. … continue reading
According to Datadog’s State of DevSecOps 2024 report, 90% of Java services have at least one or more critical or higher severity vulnerabilities. This is compared to around 75% for JavaScript services, 64% for Python, and 50% for .NET. The average for all languages studied was 47% The company found that Java services are also … continue reading
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in April 2009 for $7.4 billion, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said Java was “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.” Two months later, appearing on stage with Ellison at the JavaOne conference, Sun chairman Scott McNealy tackled the crowd’s biggest question head-on. “There’s a big, pink elephant in … continue reading
Oracle has announced the release of Java 22, which adds 12 new features to the language and aims to make the language more accessible to beginners. “The new enhancements in Java 22 enable more developers to quickly and easily build and deliver feature-rich, scalable, and secure applications to help organizations across the globe grow their … continue reading
Red Hat has announced the latest version of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), which is a tool for building and deploying Jakarta EE apps. The new release — JBoss EAP 8 — updates its Jakarta EE support to include version 10, which is the most current version. It also includes a new provisioning system … continue reading
Azul has announced a new feature that catalogs the source code used by production Java applications so that unused code can be removed. Code Inventory collects detailed information about code information within the JVM to provide a report on what is used across the Java workloads running in production. The report also includes the date … continue reading
Java 21 is here, and it includes many improvements, such as the preview of virtual threads and the final version of the generational ZGC. Most updates in Java are categorized into different named projects. In this release the features come from three projects: Project Loom, which has to do with concurrency in Java; Project Panama, … continue reading
The company announced ReadyNow Orchestrator (RNO), which is a new feature that reduces Java warmup time and uses demand to determine cloud compute capacity. “When a JVM wakes up, we believe it spends too much time profiling application usage to get the best optimizations – so we solved that when we first introduced ReadyNow. Now, … continue reading
Oracle has announced the release of Java 20, which includes seven JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs). According to Oracle, many of the new features are follow-ups to previous features, adding new functionality or making improvements, and all are either preview or incubating features. Two language updates in Java 20 are the ability to nest record patterns … continue reading
Open-source Java has long been an important part of the Java ecosystem, but over the past few years more and more companies are moving from commercial distributions to open-source ones. The move away from Oracle’s distribution has been quite significant. In fact, a 2022 New Relic survey found that Oracle’s share of the Java market … continue reading
