Issues confronting the JavaOne throng are many. The community is looking for Java updates that were held off going back to the tumult that ensued as Java originator Sun Microsystems  was courted by IBM and eventually acquired by database giant Oracle. Java on the server is under some stress, as mobile computing moves to the fore, pushing JavaScript, Java’s faux language cousin, higher in the pecking order.  That has led some to question the future of Java.

Meanwhile, a host of new languages are being fielded on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) platform, giving developers much to digest. Finally, OSGi  has edged into production as a means for modular Java app making – but it is challenged, some would say, by Jigsaw, a newer modularization scheme that apparently will not make the next Java rev. One thing is clear: Oracle is now firmly established as chief Java overseer.

For Java consultant, trainer and JavaOne presenter Venkat Subramaniam,  founder of Agile Developer, Inc.,  JavaOne is a chance to reach developers who need new ways to be effective on the JVM platform. Among key concerns he cites are concurrency. New multicore chips, he says require new programmatic ways of working with Java, whether the target platforms are conventional or new cloud varieties.

On multicore chips, [software] multithreads are on steroids, Subramaniam said. That brings out problems in Java coding that have not been uncovered in familiar single-core implementations. Multicore chips bring multiple levels of caches, he added.  “Programs that pretend to work correctly get broken. This is not a problem we invited,” he said.

For those worried about Java’s future, Subramaniam has relief. “It will continue. It is powerful. But the way we use it is going to change in the future,” he said.

How will it change?  Subramanian suggests Scala, Groovy and JRuby will appear on the JVM with greater frequency to help deal with a new architecture paradigm that places Web applications in juxtaposition to enterprise apps.

As has been seen in  other recent JavaOne events, JVM and Java as a platform are becoming as important as – or more important than – Java, the language.

“I think Java is very strong and healthy but you have to look at all the different languages that are available,” said Kirk Knoernschild, software developer. He points to Groovy, Scala and Clojure, as well as other languages as examples of the new “Java platform” landscape.

“You really need to focus more on the separation of Java as a runtime platform. More and more, we will see organizations using the right language on top of the platform,” said Knoernschild, author of “Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples Using OSGi” [Prentice Hall, 2012]. “This language could be Java. It could be Groovy. It could be Grails.”

Emerging languages on the JVM are covered in various sessions at JavaOne. Under consideration will be improvements in the JDK, and support for dynamically typed languages on the JVM.  A conference track covers some of the most popular dynamic languages  now appearing on the JVM, such as Groovy, JavaScript, JRuby, Kotlin, and Scala.

In fact, the JavaOne event offers over 500 wide-ranging sessions. Some notable choices include “Rapid Robot Programming,” “Building Mobile Apps with HTML5 and Java,” “Going Real-Time: How to Build a Streaming API,” and “How RESTful is Your REST?”

Among the nearly 540 speakers at this year’s JavaOne are the so-called “Java Champions,” a selection of community-nominated technology leaders who will run a series of technical talks and community-building activities at the conference.

Stephen Colebourne, project lead at Joda.org, is one member of that group. His talk, “From Instants to Eras, the Future of Time in Java,” will look ahead to the inclusion of an easy-to-use, expressive API for times and dates in Java SE 8. “Java Champion” Bruno Souza will talk about “101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters.” He will lead a community brainstorming session about how developer participation can influence the development of Java technologies. -Stephanie Mann and Jack Vaughan

Join the conversation on Twitter

There are some clouds on the horizon, as could be expected for a language and architecture that has been atop the heap of enterprise middleware for so many years. Writes Hilwa: “Java is under pressure from competing developer ecosystems, including the aggressively managed Microsoft platform and ecosystem and the broader Web ecosystem with its diverse technologies and lightweight scripting languages and frameworks.”

While looming lightweight languages, frameworks and runtimes do portend a new state of Java , Java’s ability to evolve to absorb new technologies has indeed proved remarkable to date. There is reason to believe there is still more to come.

The big push is to provide Java developers a single platform for doing server and client side programming.  These days, of course, those twain tend not to meet – you get out of Java to do a whole bunch of JavaScript or Flash.

“We believe the time has come to give Java developers a framework to build the world’s best-looking applications,” Kurian told the JavaOne crowd. He said Java efforts are underway to support interoperability between Java, JavaScript and HTML5.

At JavaOne, Oracle indicated it was building Java APIs for JavaFX Script like binding in JavaFX 2.0. This includes support for high performance lazy binding. Non-Java languages will be able to take advantage of this binding library.

Oracle followed up all this with a proposal to contribute the Sapphire (a jab at SAP?) Java desktop user interface designer to Eclipse (which, we might recall, itself was a jab at Sun).

The slate of new stuff includes Project Prism graphics pipeline acceleration on hardware or via software. It will target DirectX on Windows platforms (both 32 and 64 bit) and OpenGL on other systems. Will HTML5 codecs be a point of contention between Google and Oracle, as Android has? This is the point where our embedded pundit chimes in: ”Time will tell.”

Much of the original Java effort was focused on the client-side, but the server-side has been far more fruitful. The advent of HTML5 could give Java another chance to shine on the front-end, but Oracle likely faces an uphill battle there.

Well, if the OracleWorld people read the tea leaves right when Oracle rolled out the ExaData data warehouse in a box a couple of years ago, then they weren’t surprised by the heavy dose of hardware at the first day of this year’s OracleWorld. But if they didn’t read those tea leaves, they wandered into a big bundle of surprise at this year’s event. Oracle’s purchase of Sun is shaping up as a sea change for the company led by yachtsman Larry Ellison.

Center stage at Oracle World was the ExaLogic cloud in a box. It puts together Oracle VMs on Solaris or Linux, clustered WebLogic servers, the Coherence data cache, as well as Oracle JRockit and HotSpot Java Virtual Machines (destined to be combined, oh Java faithful), all optimized and running in a 386-architeced box with racks connected by InfiniBand , and employing a clustering scheme that works nicely with ExaData.  Oracle spokepeople repeatedly called it a “Middleware Machine.” Their middleware story is suddenly a hardware story, which may take a while for some to digest. What ExaData did to data, ExaLogic is intended to do to logic. “We are making Java sing on hardware,” said one Oracle technologist, citing recent benchmarks.

While it is an extraordinary box – a blinking edition was standing next to several replicas of IronMan in the Moscone lobby – claims that this is the first middleware machine are slightly inflated. Solace and Tibco have put messaging middleware on specialized hardware chips. Earlier this year IBM added data caching to its DataPower appliance. Oracle’s machine is truly an impressive piece of hardware, however, looking a bit like…well… a mainframe.

While the JavaOne crew across Market might be wondering what parts of the JRockit VM would stay and which parts of the HotSpot VM would go, and what Oracle would eventually do with Java, the Java developer ranks had yet another question to ponder: What would things be like if it had ever occurred to Sun Microsystems to ‘make Java sing on hardware?’

Keep an eye out for more OracleWorld and JavaOne coverage at TechTarget sites such as SearchOracle.com, TheServerSide.com and, of course, SearchSOA.com.

The Java Community Process Web page for Java EE 6 indicates that SCA is being considered for the next version of the enterprise platform. So in a conversation at this week’s Java One with the SAP standards guru, SearchSOA editors asked Patil if consideration should move to implementation.

Should SCA be part of Java EE 6?

“I certainly think it should,” Patil answered. “The main reason is SCA is really about assembling applications in a technology neutral way. If it was about a specific platform, such as Java EE, you could say there are enough APIs and libraries for Java applications. But if you look at the key value of SCA it’s about recognizing the fact that customers have different technologies, Java EE, BPEL, BPM systems, traditional EAI systems. They have a variety of communications mechanisms including Web services, JMS, and EDI.”

Facilitating SOA development in these heterogeneous environments was the driver behind the creation of the SCA specification by a vendor group that included SAP, IBM, Oracle Corp., and BEA Systems Inc. SCA is now making its way through the standards process at OASIS.

While there was a dearth of official talk about enterprise Java in the Java One keynote, Patil said the Java Enterprise Edition will be a major player in service component development.

“One of the main component technologies is going to be Java EE,” he said. “Our NetWeaver product is based on Java EE 5. So in our view it is important that Java EE support this high-level composition standard, SCA.”

One of the mantras in the SOA space is that it’s hard to do. Sure enough, enterprise architecture and end-to-end governance come with a high degree of difficulty, but Tuscany seemingly has made it a snap to stitch together a composite, Web-based service. According to Delfino, the idea is to abstract away the plumbing details using HTML-style annotations and map out the business logic of the service.

Version 1.2 of Tuscany (which also leverages the Service Data Objects specification) has added distributed SCA domain management, an Eclipse plug-in, Atom binding through Apache Abdera project, improved JMS binding and an OSGi runtime. Delfino used Tuscany for a demo of a fruit store which starts with an online catalog and shopping cart. For those functions he used carrot tags to name the components and declare their implementations, properties and bindings. The transport protocols could be switched just by changing a tag, Delfino chose Atompub and JSON-RPC. He noted that he was running the service a Java SE environment, saying “It doesn’t have to run in a big app server. … Basically you have an Ajax app designed as a set of SCA components.” He added the whole process takes about 15 minutes.

Then he showed how to add a new component class (vegetables in this case) and a database, the latter of which involved another Atompub feed. After that he added a third-party supplier to the service by inserting a single SOAP binding line. “You can point to a WSDL if you want or specify policies,” he said.

Finally he showed off some widget functionality Tuscany has added to the SCA process, allowing the service to communicate with HTML.

Of the widget he said, “This is still an SCA component. It still talks to the catalog. You don’t need to change the model to speak to the client side.”

It should be interesting to see what the adoption rate for Tuscany is during the rest of the calendar year, particularly in terms of who uses it, because it comes across as being a fairly simple service creation tool. Basically, if you can handle some basic HTML coding, it would seem you’ve got the savvy to use Tuscany.

Sun Microsystems executive vice president for software Rich Green hammered away on how Java provides “a high performance virtual machine” capable of running all your digital life applications. Amazon demonstrated a handheld media devices for downloading and reading books, magazines and newspapers. Sony Ericsson showed off showed off an upcoming unified media device (think iPhone). Rock ‘n’ Roll legend Neil Young stopped by to talk about why he loves Blu-ray technology.

Green did mention that these New Age applications rely upon a foundation of services that can be mashed up, but that was about as close as the session go to enterprise development. Even the GlassFish news revolved around how the OSGi-enabled modularity of v3 will allow GlassFish to become a multimedia app server not solely associated with the server.

Sun president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz claimed his company is “focusing on users.” He threw in enterprises at the end of his list of who those users might be, but it gave the distinct impression that enterprises are becoming a bit of an afterthought with the Java braintrust.

“There’s clearly a battle developing for what will be that next great developer platform,” Schwartz said.

With whom he didn’t say. He also didn’t explain how enterprises will leverage that platform other than RIA development for clients. Sun seems to have a clear picture for where it wants to be in consumer-based digital life in the future. Whether it has a growing vision for how to help enterprises with development problems they have today remains a mystery.

So what tea leaves can we read? I asked Brad Shimmin over at Current Analysis his thoughts and he said:

My impression with Java’s momentum is that it has reached a point where the platform needs to remain “consistent” top to bottom while affording specialization — much as Spring specialized as an alternative to EJB. I think Java EE 6 heads in this direction greatly with a highly modular approach that lets ISVs certify against particular aspects of the standard. That’s a good thing. Look at GlassFish for a vision of where this whole modularity thing is heading with its use of OSGi.

Well, sure enough, GlassFish v3 has OSGi support and a bunch of cool little subprojects like RESTful Web services, XML pipeline processing and an Ajax UI. Might we see the relationship between OSGi (and probably the Eclipse Foundation) and Java deepen? Now that would be revolutionary. The JCP page on Java EE 6 also mentions that Service Component Architecture could be part of the Java enterprise platform in the future.

Yet it makes you wonder if Java EE 6 has as much to offer the world as GlassFish v4 … or v5 even. Back in 2005, Sun had two hot new kids on the technology block – GlassFish and JBI. While JBI hasn’t gone much of anywhere, Sun continues to push and innovate with GlassFish. Why break a winning streak? What more can be done with the open source application server? Perhaps the biggest news this week won’t be what’s new for Java, but what’s coming up in GlassFish.