The world’s leading innovators in Java, including Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Payara, Red Hat, and Tomitribe, are collaborating at the Eclipse Foundation to advance enterprise Java technologies to support the migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud. Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile offer a path for migrating Java EE legacy applications to a standard enterprise Java stack for a cloud native world. Within the collaborative, vendor-neutral environment provided by the Eclipse Foundation, a vibrant community of developers is directly influencing the future of Java.
Establishing Jakarta EE as the place where Java EE will evolve to create this migration path to the cloud is a significant effort, and the community involved in supporting this effort have made tremendous strides. These have included releasing Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 as Java EE 8 certified, thus ensuring backward compatibility, and establishing an open specification process as a replacement for the JCP. Next up is to release Jakarta EE 8 as an established specification and see the commercial vendors support this release, again ensuring the migration path forward. As this happens, all developers are encouraged to participate as Jakarta EE then evolves. The first step in doing this is to join the conversation by visiting https://jakarta.ee/connect/.
Jakarta EE Developer Survey Results Show Cloud Native Adoption Accelerating Dramatically with Jakarta EE
The Eclipse Foundation recently released the 2019 Jakarta EE Developer Survey that canvassed nearly 1,800 Java developers about their adoption of Jakarta EE and trends in Java programming. The goal of the survey, which was conducted in March 2019, was to help Java ecosystem stakeholders better understand the requirements, priorities, and perceptions of enterprise Java developer communities.
The findings indicate that cloud native is critically important with a third of developers currently building cloud native architectures and another 30 percent planning to within the next year. Meanwhile, the number of Java applications running in the cloud is projected to increase significantly over the next two years, with 32 percent of respondents expecting that they will be running nearly two-thirds of their Java applications in the cloud in two years. Furthermore, 43 percent of respondents consider the microservices architecture the dominant approach to implementing Java in the cloud.
While Spring and Spring Boot continue to dominate as the leading framework for building cloud native applications in Java, Eclipse MicroProfile’s usage growth more than doubled in adoption from 13 percent in 2018 to 28 percent today.
Survey respondents made it clear that as the community-driven evolution of enterprise Java coalesces around Jakarta EE, Java EE remains the platform they rely on most to build enterprise-class applications. According to the results, the top three community priorities for Jakarta EE are a tie at first with better support for microservices and native integration with Kubernetes (both at 61 percent) followed by product quality reference implementation (37 percent).
Access the full findings of the 2019 Java Community Developer Survey here.
Key Eclipse Projects for Cloud Native Application Development
In addition to Jakarta EE and MicroProfile, the Eclipse community is driving cloud native innovation with the following projects:
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Eclipse IDE — As the leading open platform for professional developers, the standard Eclipse IDE is the critical development environment for more than 4 million active users. The Eclipse IDE was chosen by the Java developer community as the top IDE for building cloud native applications in the 2019 Jakarta EE Developer Survey.
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Eclipse OpenJ9 — OpenJ9 is a Java virtual machine (JVM), the engine that runs Java applications, optimized for the cloud and microservices. OpenJ9 comes with improvements to memory overhead and startup times, achieved through shared classes and an aggressive focus on memory footprint.
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Eclipse Vert.x — Vert.x is a toolkit for building reactive applications on the JVM.
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Eclipse Jemo — Jemo is the leading open source multi-cloud function-as-a-service (FaaS) runtime for JVM based languages. Built to take advantage of Kubernetes, Jemo provides a platform, frameworks, and runtime support for building cloud native applications which run across multiple clouds without the need for re-engineering.
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Eclipse Theia — Theia is an extensible open-source framework to develop multi-language IDEs for the cloud and desktop using state-of-the-art web technologies.
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Eclipse Che — Che is a next-generation developer workspace server and cloud IDE that allows anyone to contribute to a project without installing any software. Che defines workspaces that include their dependencies including embedded containerized runtimes (including Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Docker support), Web IDE (based on Theia), and project code. This enables true team-based development by making workspaces distributed, collaborative, and portable.
How to Participate in the Future Of Cloud Native Java
To learn more about the collaborative efforts to build tomorrow’s enterprise Java platform for the cloud, check out the Jakarta Blogs and participate in the monthly Jakarta Tech Talks. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Eclipse newsletter and get involved in Jakarta EE, Eclipse MicroProfile and other cloud native Eclipse projects.
