Clouds, sunshine, or a cozy little world for Java

Honza Novotný and Lukáš Křečan went to this year's GeeCON and shared their impressions of what went on there in GeeCON — part one, GeeCON 2010 — day one and GeeCON 2010 — day two. What caught me off guard in those reports was the unflagging belief in a bright future for Java. I have to admit that after reading A Discussion with Josh Bloch on the Future of Java and hearing what the guys had to say, I see several major problems.

There's a fairly simple rule that if you don't innovate, you'll be seeing the world from six feet under. You don't have to innovate a lot, but you have to do it, or sooner or later the competition will trample you into the ground. All we hear is one piece of bad news after another. The JCP, the main driver of Java standardization, is caught in a strange tangle of competing interests and unresolved licensing problems around the TCK. Sun clearly underestimated Java 7 development, and we're now hearing that it allocated too few people and too little money. Now nobody really knows what will be in Java 7, let alone when it will ship. I could hardly believe my eyes during the closures presentation when I saw how amateurishly such a major change was being managed (they're adding it in beta!). In that light it's worth seeing just how many areas a language extension affects.

To top it off, they're planning to do away with having two JVM implementations under one roof, JRockit and HotSpot. I understand that funding two teams that do the same thing isn't economical. On the other hand, where would either JVM be without competition from the other? What's good news for the people holding the purse strings isn't good news for us users. I can hardly imagine how the two solutions will come together, technically or in terms of the people working on them.

If there's one thing that's true in IT, it's that things are never quite as good as they look at conferences or quite as desperate as insiders see them (in this case, people at Sun). Java isn't clinically dead, but the sun isn't shining on a path to a brighter future either. The truth is somewhere in between. I wouldn't put it particularly poetically: it stinks a little, but it's nice and warm. Unfortunately, a state of stagnation like this tends to get worse. Let's be honest: nothing will change unless someone comes along who can shake things up. I'm a little worried it won't be Oracle, at least if it puts all its energy into JavaFX. That might help parts of the platform, but not the whole thing.