Java Full-Stack Report January 2023: New & Noteworthy
What’s This?
Here are my most important news for Java developers from last month: Java InfoQ Trends Report 2022, GraalVM Java compilers join OpenJDK in 2023, and one in five Java developers uses Visual Studio Code.
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New & Noteworthy
Java InfoQ Trends Report 2022
Once a year, the Java team at InfoQ (which includes me) publishes their trend report. Here are three significant findings:
- Native Java with the GraalVM Native Image Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compiler will grow as the OpenJDK projects Leyden & Galahad move forward. That makes Java cheaper in the cloud.
- Java Virtual Threads simplify concurrent programming and make Java also cheaper. Java frameworks seem to adopt Virtual Threads quickly.
- Java 11 has finally overtaken Java 8. And we’re seeing Java 17 share growing faster than Java 11, boosted by Spring Boot 3.0 requiring Java 17.
For more information, read the article!
GraalVM Java Compilers Join OpenJDK in 2023
Talking about GraalVM: The Community Editions of the GraalVM JIT and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilers will move to OpenJDK in 2023 as part of Project Galahad. That will make using them easier for us. And yes, it’s that Galahad, the knight at King Arthur’s Round Table, searching for the Holy Grail. Grail, GraalVM — get it? One may even call this a dig by OpenJDK against the Oracle Labs project GraalVM: Galahad was an illegitimate son…
Anyhow, at OpenJDK, the GraalVM Java Compilers will align with Java releases and use the OpenJDK Community processes. Existing releases, GraalVM Enterprise Edition features, and other GraalVM projects will remain at GraalVM. And GraalVM still does releases: GraalVM 22.3 provides experimental support for JDK 19 and improves observability.
Another OpenJDK project, Leyden, will standardize how AOT compilation fits into the Java specification. We need this because a native Java executable can’t do some of the things “regular Java programs” can do, such as loading arbitrary classes and files at runtime. Project Leyden will also define far-reaching optimizations for regular Java applications running in a JRE with a JIT compiler, without having to use the GraalVM AOT compiler.
One in Five Java Developers Uses Visual Studio Code
We are ten million Java developers. And one in five of us uses VS Code, Microsoft’s free cross-platform and cross-language IDE.
Unfortunately, this announcement lacks important details: Does it mean “using VS Code for Java development”? And how often do you have to use VS Code for Java development to qualify here? Just once? Once a month? Or daily?
And is two million a lot? We don’t know because we don’t know how many Java developers use IntelliJ, Eclipse, or NetBeans! Also, VS Code isn’t a fully-fledged Java IDE yet. Still, VS Code is popular enough that IntelliJ maker JetBrains copies it, as does Eclipse.