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Tag: Java SE

  • Eclipse Foundation Touts Java SE Temurin Certification Momentum

    Eclipse Foundation Touts Java SE Temurin Certification Momentum

    The Eclipse Foundation revealed today the number of downloads for Java Standard Edition (SE)—dubbed Eclipse Temurin—certified using both a technology compatibility kit (TCK) and compatibility tests for evaluating associated runtimes reached 12.3 million in February.

    Tim Ellison, a project lead for creating compatibility tests for the Eclipse Foundation, said that level of activity suggests the governance framework for an Eclipse Adoptium project that enables developers to download compatible runtimes based OpenJDK source code from multiple providers is gaining traction. Members of the Adoptium working group include Alibaba Cloud, Bloomberg, Google Huawei, IBM, iJUG, Karakun AG, Microsoft, New Relic, Red Hat and Rivos. Eclipse Temurin has also become the default Java option for the GitHub Actions continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

    OpenJDK is a free and open source implementation of Java SE provided by Oracle. AdoptOpenJDK was created in 2017 to provide open source Java runtimes based on OpenJDK. Since then, AdoptOpenJDK has been downloaded more than 240 million times. The Eclipse Adoptium working group has negotiated with Oracle to create an OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (OCTLA) that allows it to run compatibility tests to ensure conformance to the Java specification.

    One of the reasons Eclipse Temurin is gaining traction is organizations are looking to reduce Java licensing costs during uncertain economic times by relying on an open source platform. At the same time, a consistent set of certified runtimes also reduces the level of DevOps friction that might otherwise be encountered when building and deploying Java applications, noted Ellison. There will, of course, always be multiple Java runtimes, but the level of incompatibility that would exist without testing them could be substantially higher, he noted.

    Despite the plethora of programming languages developers use, after more than 25 years, Java remains the dominant language for developers working in enterprise IT organizations. Developers may be building and deploying applications faster, but most of them will continue to rely on the programming language they already know rather than master another. In addition, many of the Java applications that have been deployed over the last two decades are now being modernized within the context of a cloud migration.

    Arguably, Java is experiencing a renaissance following efforts to make it simpler for multiple organizations to contribute code to open source projects and increase the pace of innovation. The rate at which organizations can absorb that innovation will naturally vary, but it’s clear that more organizations are now running later editions of Java that improve both performance and cybersecurity overall.

    In the meantime, DevOps teams should expect to see more Java projects moving through pipelines in the months and years ahead. While not every legacy Java application may need to be updated before being retired, it’s apparent that the bulk of Java applications are still relevant. As such, it’s probable the efforts to modernize those applications will keep DevOps teams occupied well through the end of the decade.

  • VMware Brings Java 17 Support to Spring Boot Framework

    VMware Brings Java 17 Support to Spring Boot Framework

    VMware this week made a Spring Boot 3.0 update for building microservices-based Java applications that is based on the latest long-term support release for the Java Standard Edition (SE) platform.

    Michael Minella, senior director of software engineering at VMware, said the latest edition of the framework supports Java 17. The hope is that adding this support will encourage organizations to move from Java 8 to the latest long-term release of the platform without requiring multiple upgrades to other previously released editions of Java SE.

    In addition, Spring Boot 3.0 now also natively supports a high-performance Java development kit (JDK) known as GraalVM along with version 6.0 of the Spring framework for building Java applications using OpenJDK, an open source version of Java SE that VMware made available earlier this month.

    VMware added support for Micrometer and Micrometer Tracing to improve the observability of Spring applications that will increasingly include multiple microservices dependencies.

    Finally, VMware also added support for Jakarta Enterprise Edition (EE) 10, an open source extension of Java SE that is being advanced under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation.

    Minella said support for Java 17 coupled with GraalVM provides a stable foundation for building Java applications that are significantly faster than applications that rely on Java 8—still the most widely used edition of the platform. DevOps teams should begin to adopt a new standard for building and deploying the Java applications that still dominate enterprise IT environments, Minella said.

    There is, of course, no shortage of programming languages being used to build enterprise applications. After three decades, however, Java continues to dominate, in large part because of the sheer number of developers that have Java programming skills.

    It’s less clear how quickly legacy Java applications will be updated to run on Java 17 and the GraalVM. Now that Java 17 is supported in Spring Boot—the most widely used framework for building Java applications—the pace of adoption for the latest long-term release of the Java SE platform should accelerate in 2023.

    In addition, Minella noted the latest edition of the Spring framework will put organizations in a better position to take advantage of forthcoming advances such as Project Loom, an OpenJDK effort to replace threads with a lighter-weight concurrency model based on fibers that are managed via the Java runtime rather than the underlying operating system.

    Collectively, these and other technologies will make it less expensive to run Java applications that are significantly faster than previous generations of applications, he added.

    Most DevOps teams will find themselves managing a mix of Java applications—constructed using multiple variants of the core Java SE platform—for many years to come. However, it’s probable most new Java applications will be based on Java 17. In addition, there will be efforts to modernize legacy applications based on previous iterations of Java SE. As a result, most DevOps teams working in enterprise IT environments should expect to see an increase in the overall number of Java-based projects using microservices moving through their pipelines in the months ahead.