Java is a full-featured and general-purpose programming language that was initiated in 1991 by a team led by James Gosling and Patrick Naughton at Sun Microsystems. Let's take a look at the evolution of Java in the hands of its developers.
The Java programming language
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems released the first Java public implementation, version 1.0, in 1996. The concept of write once run anywhere, with the promise of great portability of software and ease of learning and use from the developers (in particular for automatic memory management and object-oriented paradigms) have all facilitated the rapid spread of Java in the information technology ecosystem.
The evolution and spread of the language was fast and continuous. After the two releases JDK 1.1 (February, 1997) and Java Standard Edition (JSE) 1.2 (December, 1998), Sun Microsystems released Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE (which was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)).
This was intended as a set of specifications, based on Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), dedicated to enterprise applications that were rapidly moving from a desktop's local environment to a web browser environment.
At the end of 2006, Sun decided to donate the major part of the core code of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Standard and Enterprise Edition, as open source software under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). At the beginning of 2007, Sun completed the process, making all of its JVM's code available under free software and open source distribution terms. The final result of this process is the creation of OpenJDK, which became the open source implementation of the Java SE.
The work Sun did during these 10 years, from the first public release of 1996 to the birth of OpenJDK and the open source release of the JVM core and JSE platform in 2007, ideally made its role with regard to Java seem like that of an evangelist.
Oracle Corporation
After this great period, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009-2010.
At the beginning of this new era, Oracle declared that it will continue supporting and investing in Java for customers. You can take a look at the declaration on the following site: https://web.archive.org/web/20100131091008/http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/java/index.html
Despite this declaration; the resignation from Oracle of James Gosling, the father of Java, in 2010; and the lawsuit against Google in 2012 related to the use of Java in the Android SDK; changed the perception of the community about the future of the Java language.
Oracle tried to give new impulse to Java and, after almost five years, released a new Java SE version (JDK 7 - July, 2011) and a new Java Enterprise Release (Java EE 7 - June, 2013). Furthermore, OpenJDK became a reference implementation of Java SE since version 7.
The rapid evolution of business requirements and the slowdown of the Java source life cycle convinced Oracle to change the strategy about the Java platform with a clear bet on the open source model.
OpenJDK binaries are the reference implementation of the JSE platform. OpenJDK is an incubator of the latest new features and has defined time-based releases that will be delivered every year in March and September. The version numbers follow the schema of year-month (YY.M). Unlike the previous release approach, this one will not be delayed to await a major feature to be completed and stabilized—an example was the delay of JDK 8 due to Jigsaw project issues, which was then retargeted into JDK 9.
With the new model, the new features will not be merged all together into a release source control repository until they are complete. If they are not ready to be included in a new release, they will be retargeted for the next release or later. The intention of this model is to avoid problems with a feature that, if not ready, could delay an entire release that could contain other features useful for developers.
Those enterprises and organizations that don't necessarily want or need to upgrade at a rapid pace will be free to choose a vendor to have support for a specific Java version, depending on market reaction. The same choice was also made for Java EE.
During the years, the platform became very big. The need to maintain backward compatibility and the delay of new Java SE releases, on which it depends, have made the platform very difficult to manage, delaying its evolution and making it unattractive for environments, such as cloud and microservices, in continuous evolution.
Eclipse Foundation
At the end of 2017, Oracle announced the donation of Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. Initially, the project was named Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J). After a survey taken by the community, the name of Java EE was changed, in order to avoid legal problems due to the fact that Oracle owns the trademark for the name Java, to Jakarta Enterprise Edition (Jakarta EE)—the entry point for the new platform is Java EE 8.
Under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation community, and with the commitment of the major vendors, the Enterprise Edition platform could start a new life in order to accelerate the adoption for the implementation of business applications for a cloud-native world.
The migration of all source code to Jakarta EE is proceeding quickly but, in the meantime, the evolution of the cloud environment and microservices require immediate answers in terms of standards and implementation models.
For this reason, Eclipse MicroProfile was created, as it's meant to optimize Enterprise Java for a microservice architecture. MicroProfile is aimed at spurring innovation that may result in future as a standard, but at the moment requires a faster rate of change than the intentionally measured pace of a standard process.
The expectation is that the existing Eclipse MicroProfile community and other open source communities should continue leading the way. Jakarta EE will incorporate Java innovations from these projects and communities into new versions in order to have complete and strong standards.
The following screenshot shows the history of Java EE releases, in terms of versions and the time duration between each of them, in months:
As you can see, the intervals between releases keep getting longer, and the last release version, which is Java EE 8, came out after 52 months!
In the next section, we will analyze the details of the latest OpenJDK versions, 9 and 10, and the Java EE 8 platform. These represent the base on which Eclipse MicroProfile is found, which is the Java Enterprise proposal for the realization of microservice architectures in cloud environments.
