When Java shops grow up they become web companies

One of our fav. #S1P talks: @monkchips of @RedMonk on the Java renaissance & associated cultural change. Full talk: https://t.co/54P5Eq65pp pic.twitter.com/x6tAJy6wt7

— VMware Tanzu (@VMwareTanzu) November 19, 2016

I have been invited to give a talk on the Java renaissance many times over the last few years – it remains a theme of perennial interest. Rumours of Java’s demise have been much exaggerated for some years now. Web companies which start life with a strong anti Java bias invariably become more pragmatic over time, and adopt Java at scale.  Big Data has largely been nurtured by open source Java ecosystems – in particular the Apache Software Foundation – often on the back of contributions from these Web companies (Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra etc).

At Spring One Platform this year Andrew Clay Shafer encouraged me to give the narrative a little spin. What if, instead of When web companies grow up they turn into Java shops, we did something a little different – When Java shops grow up they turn into web companies. Enterprises are now reshoring, bringing development back inhouse, and retooling around Cloud Native approaches, but taking advantage of Java. Not everyone is going to learn Go overnight, after all. Pivotal’s Spring Boot is an opinionated framework designed for building post-JEE Cloud Native apps. If you’re interested in learning more about building Cloud Native apps with Spring, Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry you should check out Josh Long and Kenny Bastani’s book on the subject – it should ship in the next couple of months.

At the conference I was inspired by the engineering culture-led transformations of companies such as Citi, Allstate, Ford and McKesson, and wrote Spring Won Platform the big switch just happened.  So it was cool to be part of that story. Here is a video of my own presentation at the event.

Extra bonus stuff – I also recorded a podcast series with Andrew before the event – we talk about patterns for success, whether companies need to adopt open source in order to become successful, the inevitable nod to Netflix, and why good tech events can literally change your life.

Pivotal, a RedMonk Patron, paid for my talk and T&E to Spring One Platform.