Modern Java Delivery: Java 17, 18 and Open JDK

Java has been around for as long as I have in this industry, which is… quite a long time. And it’s still in pretty rude health all things considered. Oracle’s stewardship of Java has been good for the language. The release train is steady and metronomic now, six months to new features, six months to a new LTS release. Modern language features such as generics and lambdas have kept modern developers happy, and organisations, enterprises and Web companies alike, continue to rely on Java for a huge range of workloads.

In our programming language rankings Java continues to chug along with a solid and respectable showing in the top three programming languages – JavaScript, Python and Java. How about Java on modern infrastructure? The big public cloud logo companies – Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and now Oracle are all heavily investing in Java language, runtime support and managed and management services, seeking to win enterprise workloads for modernization. Why invest in Java? Because that’s where the money is.

But Java is of course also a set of interlocked communities, which gives it strength and resilience. See Spring and Eclipse for example. Oracle has managed to balance competing interests pretty well over the years, and it’s support of Open JDK and opening up of Java EE have contributed to community resilience.

In this conversation, yours truly talks to Georges Saab, Oracle VP of Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Oracle VP of Java and GraalVM Marketing about Java now (17 and 18), and what’s coming next. Developer Experience, cloud managed services, and the return of Java One!

Let me know what you think and please smash like on YouTube, share, follow, and all that good stuff.

Oracle is a RedMonk client, and sponsored this video. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all clients.