Forrester, a source of high quality commentary and brilliant analysis, posted John R. Rymer's "The Future of Java," in which he makes insightful observations like that within ten years people may be looking somewhere else than Java.

Truly awesome work. He basis this analysis on scary stuff like this:

• Oracle will direct Java innovation. (Me: good to have someone at the wheel for once, someone who wants to make a profit and not get bought out by your competitors and knows how to make that happen)
• OpenJDK is not fully open. While he's got a point here, I guess, Oracle's at least not playing footsie with potential implementers while keeping them out in the cold anyways.
• The JCP is dying. He must have just figured this out. Meanwhile people have been saying this for a long time, and look how great the JCP has done for us, by doing stupid stuff like EJB 1.x. Recetly its better, but that's mostly because it started accepting what the industry does instead of making its own paths.
• Competition will shift to frameworks. Look out, world. Some day someone may come up with a dependency injection called "Summer," and somsone else might come up with a dependency injection library called "Milk" and they might compete. This is hard to see happening but you never know.
• Fewer young developers will learn Java first. Yeah, i agree with this one, actually. They'll learn objective C first, then move to Java so they can learn how to pogram the Android.

The funniest things are in his conclusion, which I'm splitting up to point out each funny part in its own paragraph:

These ecosystem changes will have minimal immediate impact on customers.

Customers will see predictable and stable enhancements of enterprise Java middleware. But Oracle and its close Java partners are in a classic "innovator's dilemma."

It may take a decade, but the bottom-up innovation the open source community drives will find expression elsewhere, and smaller companies that Java's high-end capabilities do not serve well will gravitate toward a new "good enough" open platform — likely based on a combination of LAMP and HTML 5 open standards.

Just amazing. Someone else pointed out how great Forrester is at this, with "Forrester: Businesses need Vista, should shun the Mac." Hee hee hee! Yeah, I bet that's advice that flew well.

Forrester wants people to pay for their article. I mean really, we're suppose to pay for fluff.

Çini Silimi ve Karo Silimi i?lerine yo?unla?an firmamiz sizin için mermer ve zemin silimi i?lemlerini de yapmaktadir. Dizayn Restorasyon, Restorasyon Çini bak?m?, temizli?i ve beyazlat?lmasi i?lemleri yapilmaktadir.

So we are somewhat into the Oracle acquisition of Sun and a few actions have been taken by Oracle and a few vendor/community reactions have happened.  Sadly, there is little that is actionable from this article and it is probably still too early to tell.  If you are in an Oracle shop, you may scratch your head at this article.  If you are in  a shop not using an Oracle database or tools, you may care more but realize it is too early to tell.

Oracle is clearly in the driver's seat and it appears they will drive monetization which is going to cost somebody some money.  If the market turns and a new wave of cost adverse start-ups pop-up, we may see the next trend materialize.  Until then its business as usual.  I think the real story will be what database start-ups use in a cloud not what language.

LAMP is such as easy out.  It has always been there and always will be.

Once upon a time, The Server Side was actually a decent place to catch up on what was happening around the java world.

Now - we get this tripe, that represents an incredibly uninformed analysis of Java - not to mention an inability to use a spell checker.

Seriously TSS - get some new writers, or just pack up now... We may even remember that you were once credible.

Maybe it's me, but I think this rather DID happen around the Java world? Forrester gets taken pretty seriously by people who affect our jobs, so it seems relevant that they're putting out FUD - was the author out of touch with what the article said? Did he get his facts wrong?

I rather thought it gave us, as Java developers, something to think about so that we would know how to respond when people mention stuff like Forrester proclaiming Java's impending death. God knows that non-Java developers are probably having a field day.

So... while I think there's something left to be desired here, I think the post itself was worthwhile.

Once upon a time, The Server Side was actually a decent place to catch up on what was happening around the java world.

The problem is, not much is happening around the Java world. There's a general churn of new software versions, but nothing really exciting.

I'm still curious what the alternative language will be. I've done some objective-c (iPad) lately and that certainly is worse than Java.

In the end you need to tell a computer what to do, i.o.w. the programming code in the end must all generate in essence the same machine code instructions. So is it a matter of how efficient a programming language is? How much keywords are needed to generate that machine code? I mean, a programming language cannot guess what you want to do, you still have to tell it. The reason behind an if won't simply go away.

So the question would be; is Java efficient in doing its tasks? How much keystrokes are required to write the code? But that is not the only factor. The drawback of few keystrokes often is readability. I remember the contests where one would try to write a C programm in as few characters as possible. Or how about regexp? Anyone care to debug such an expression?

So in the end it's about the balance of how many keystrokes it requires to code a certain logic in a readable form. Java IMHO is fine on most code. Except, I would say, setters & getters and (one method) anonymous inner classes for listeners The last is being worked on. 

Are other languages much better with their readability / keystrokes factor?

Let's put this into perspective.

Forrester is there to give an executiive summary to people who are not actively involved in the Java community, like CTOs and other key decision makers. These people need some kind of overview of all kinds of technology issues, and this is a "reasonsble" overview of the current state of Java. Of course all this stuff is "obvious" to us.

Consider the target audience before blurting this stuff out.

And by the way EJB 1.x didn't come from the JCP anyway, the JCP started later.

All the more reason for people who DO read TSS to pay attention. Wouldn't you love to go to a meeting and have this sprung on you by some VP who reads Forrester but doesn't know anything about the actual technology?

I'd rather be forewarned, personally.

If only there was some way to intercept all the garbage that flows to Management so we could be prepared.

@Pointcut("execution(public * management(..))") private void anyManagementOperation() {} @Pointcut("within(com.forrester.fud..*") private void inForrester() {} @Pointcut("anyManagementOperation() && inForrester()") private void forresterManagementOperation() {}

LOL. Good stuff. But that only covers Forrester. How about Gartner, CIO Magazine or any other magazine they read, what they hear at conferences, what they hear on the golf course and ... 

Fortunately, Java is starting to lose what was appealing, the opennes and the fact that it was cheap to integrate. What Oracle will do, in the next years, we can not know, but I am betting, that a lot of migration from Java to other platform will be and I am not talking about those who hava a large scale application, but those who are in the middle and a platform change as well as a progamming language doesn't mean the rethinking the whole idea. As I said it before, there are other platforms with their pros and cons, Scala, Ruby, Python, PHP etc. have the advantage of being OS independent, on the other hand .NET is Windows dependent, but struggle to catch up the competion with the community that is behind and a shy opennes to their users and customers.

What will it happen we can not know, right now, but Oracle intention is clearly to allign Java and others to their niche, a nice elite group which is quite hard to enter.

In my opinion the open Java like we know it now has one ally, Google, with their Android OS, but in the near future something will change in this area. The lawsuit that Oracle intended and the fact that Google wants to be the leader on OS in the smartphone market will clearly make some changes.

 As of what CS curicula, in my freshmen year in college the first language that I learn was C++ and the second was Java, personally I enjoyed  Java more than C++, but now with the lately news, I am currently thinking of migrating to other platforms.  Probably coding in Java just for fun, or if I have to develop on android.