On March 13, Azul gathered Java developers, enthusiasts, and Java Champions to celebrate 30 years of Java. An impressive lineup of luminaries gave presentations. In this blog post we recap the OpenJDK Ecosystem Panel featuring three Java luminaries, moderated by Azul Deputy CTO Simon Ritter.
What pressing issues are on the minds of Java developers? And who better to ask those questions than Simon Ritter, deputy CTO at Azul? On March 13 Ritter engaged a panel of Java experts, Richard Fichtner, Carmen Delgado, and Toby Ajila. Richard is principal software architect at XDEV Software GmbH, Carmen is community manager, at Eclipse Adoptium, and Toby is Java runtime developer at IBM.
How does open-source Java impact developers’ roles?
Toby: I do think it’s fostered more collaboration the codes out there in the open, people can come in and make suggestions. It helps people understand the products a bit better.
Carmen: Our role is to steward and guarantee that our project gets vendor neutrality and is open. And thanks to that, we can… foster collaboration with end users and also between others in our case because we are like the home of the OpenJDK distribution and Open Foundation Tamarin.
Richard: If a customer of ours has a problem, we can go into the source code, determine where the problem is, and work with people all over the world to fix that. And that is way better than to have to go to some company, file a bug, and say, hey, can you do something about this?
Simon: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think that that choice is really the key thing, because when you have an open source project, you can have multiple distributions, and then you’ve got a choice of which one to actually use, and you can base that on whatever properties those distributions have, which is best for you. So yeah, I think that’s all very good points. Okay, so moving on from that sort of first question.
Is it good for Java to have a formal standard associated with it?
Carmen: If you have a standardized way of doing things, it’s easy for people to contribute and to understand how things work. So it also fosters collaboration for vendor neutrality because you get more people involved in making the same decision.
Toby: I think the standard is very important, especially for end users. From a development perspective, I think there’s always going to be a tension. The more process you have, the slower things tend to be. But I think in the last few years, especially with the change in how releases are done, starting from Java 9 every six months, there has been a fast pace of progress.
Does having a formal standard reduce Java’s pace of innovation?
Toby: I don’t think it reduces the innovation. It might delay it a bit because standardizing features does take time.
Richard: I’m judging on the same point. I’d rather have something that that is stable and maybe not that innovative, but works for 30 years.
Will there be continued innovation? How could we make the JVM better?
Toby: I certainly do think there’ll be continued innovation. If you look backwards, a lot of the features that have come out in the last few years were in response to the needs of industry.
I think the right steps are being made. I think certainly cloud workloads are very important. Fast Startup, low memory is always going to be important.
What are the challenges of running distributions?
Carmen: We also have other projects, like the test suite and the migration toolkit, mission control and those projects. The maintainers also had users. So I’ve been working with a community to identify all those users’ needs, all those stakeholder needs, and understand how we can collaborate all together.
How easily can Java users influence the direction of development of OpenJDK?
Richard: I think it’s very easy, but most people don’t know how they can do it. So the first thing would be to talk to people that work on JVMs, on the JDKs, on the distributions. And then, of course, there’s the Java Community Process that is not very well known.
What are your thoughts on the future of Java and OpenJDK ecosystem?
Carmen: I am thrilled to see more innovation and more collaboration between… between vendors, actually, I always say, it’s the spirit of keeping OpenJDK and keeping the door open to both users and distributors to work together.
Toby: I think just more of the same, really, it’s an open community. There’s a lot of innovation, a lot of activity, and I think I expect to see more of that, and I think Java will continue to grow.
Richard: I think that the main problem for Java is not the technical thing, because it’s already super great. The thing is, we need to change the perception of Java. A lot of people still think of Java as Java 6, Java 8… but… with the six-month release cadence, Java has innovated so much, and the tech is there.
