Java turns 30, and there’s no stopping it now

Happy Birthday, Java! Even as rivals Python and Rust claim the spotlight, proponents say the 30-year-old language will continue to forge ahead.

Introduced by Sun Microsystems on May 23, 1995, Java is a pillar of enterprise computing. The language has thrived through three decades, including the transition to Oracle after the company purchased Sun in 2010. Today, it maintains a steady position at or near the top of the Tiobe language popularity index. Java designer James Gosling, considered the father of Java, said this week that Java is “still being heavily used and actively developed.” Java’s usage statistics are still very strong, he said. “I’m sure it’s got decades of life ahead of it.”

Oracle’s Georges Saab, senior vice president of the Oracle Java Platform, took a similar stance. “Java has a long history of perseverance through changes in technology trends and we see no sign of that abating,” Saab said. “Time and time again, developers and enterprises choosing Java have been rewarded by the ongoing improvements keeping the language, runtime, and tools fresh for new hardware, programming paradigms, and use cases.”

Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor and publisher of the monthly Tiobe language popularity index, offered a more mixed view. “Java is the ‘here to stay’ language for enterprise applications, that is for certain,” Jansen said. However, “it is not the go-to language anymore for smaller applications. Its platform independence is still a strong feature, but it is verbose if compared to other languages and its performance could also be better,” he said.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, developer of the Java-based Hudson CI/CD system, later forked to Jenkins, sees Java lasting many more years. “Clearly, it’s not going away,” he said. Scott Sellers, CEO and cofounder of Oracle rival and Java provider Azul, said Java remains essential to organizations. In a recent survey, Azul found that 99% of companies it surveyed use Java in their infrastructure or software, and it serves as the backbone of business-critical applications.

Java also is expanding into new frontiers such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and edge computing, Sellers said this week. “It’s been incredible to witness Java’s journey—from its early days with Sun Microsystems, to its ongoing innovation under the OpenJDK community’s stewardship,” Sellers said. “It continues to deliver what developers want and businesses need: independence, scalability, and resilience. Java is where innovation meets stability. It has been—and will continue to be—a foundational language.”

Java is in good hands with Oracle, Saab stressed. Oracle continues to drive Java innovation via the OpenJDK community to address rapidly changing application use cases, he said. “Equally, Oracle is advancing its stewardship of the Java ecosystem to help ensure the next 30 years and beyond are open and inclusive for developer participation.”

Charles Oliver Nutter, a core member of the team building JRuby, a language on the JVM, sees Java now evolving faster than it ever has in his career. “From the language to the JVM itself, the pace of improvements is astounding. Java 21 seemed like a big leap for JRuby 10, but we are already looking forward to the new releases,” Nutter said. “It’s a very exciting time to be a developer on the JVM and I’m helping projects and companies take advantage of it today.”

JDK 25, the next version of standard Java and a long-term support release, is due September 16.