Java at 30: Java Pioneers Look Back, Forward
The Java programming language celebrated its 30th birthday last month. The language that promised to let developers “write once, run anywhere” has not only survived but thrived through three decades of technological advancement.
From the early days of mobile phones to today’s cloud native applications and emerging AI landscape, Java has proven its staying power in ways that even its creators might not have anticipated.
I reached out to industry veterans, developers, platform architects and thought leaders who have witnessed and played a part in Java’s evolution firsthand to understand what has made this language so enduring — and what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
The Foundation of Success
“Java achieving its 30th birthday is a true milestone,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, emphasizing the language’s fundamental contributions across multiple domains. “Java ME [Java Platform, Micro Edition] defined the mobile phone market for over a decade, Java SE [Java Platform, Standard Edition] gave us the ubiquitous Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and Java EE [Java Platform, Enterprise Edition] redefined enterprise application development for a generation.”
Meanwhile, Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss, now part of Red Hat, and a pioneer in the open source Java space, touted Java’s fundamental role in modern computing infrastructure: “Java, and specifically open source Java, has become synonymous with net infrastructure. Java is an inextricable part of the plumbing of the internet. The ‘write once, run anywhere’ and ‘the network is the computer’ mantras [taglines from Sun Microsystems – the creator of Java, acquired by Oracle] have become reality.”
The technical foundation that enabled this success cannot be overstated. Rod Johnson, the creator of the Spring Framework, points to the JVM as a cornerstone.
“The JVM is an amazing piece of software. It’s robust and performant and runs much of the world,” he said.
“The JVM is an amazing piece of software. It’s robust and performant and runs much of the world.”
— Rod Johnson, creator of the Spring Framework
This sentiment is echoed by Forrester analyst Andrew Cornwall, who noted that “separating the VM from the language allowed other languages, like Groovy and Kotlin, to use the Java VM and bytecodes in innovative ways.”
The real-world impact of these architectural decisions is perhaps best illustrated by developers who have built their entire careers on the platform.
Mik Kersten, creator of the Mylyn project and founder of Tasktop (now part of Planview), whose entire tech career has been built on Java, emphasized the platform’s scalability advantages.
“As your application complexity grows, you move to Java earlier, it actually scales in my experience much, much better.” His journey from AspectJ, an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) extension for the Java programming language, and his research at Xerox PARC, to founding Tasktop illustrates Java’s staying power — even when prototyping AI applications in Python, “the entire implementation, the production implementation, is all Java,” Kersten said.
Moreover, Eric Newcomer, an analyst at Intellyx, noted Java’s pioneering role as “the first ‘write once, run anywhere’ language” and “the first widely used object-oriented language,” positioning it for the enterprise adoption that would follow, he said.
Perfect Timing and Strategic Positioning
Java’s success wasn’t just about technical merit — it was also about being in the right place at the right time.
Grady Booch, creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research, told The New Stack that Java “came into the world in the context of a perfect storm: the commercial web was exploding; there was a compelling need for more expressive web experiences; existing languages were a bit too heavyweight.”
“[Java] came into the world in the context of a perfect storm: the commercial web was exploding; there was a compelling need for more expressive web experiences; existing languages were a bit too heavyweight.”
— Grady Booch, creator of the UML
Forrester’s Cornwall expanded on this timing advantage.
“When it came out in 1995, Java brought object-oriented programming and automated memory management without forcing developers to stray from a familiar C-like syntax,” he said. “It grew up with the internet and, with J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition], targeted enterprises explicitly.”
The enterprise focus proved crucial. Newcomer notes that “IBM (and others) invested heavily in Java EE as an alternative to CORBA [Common Object Request Broker Architecture]” and “the servlet engine piece of EE drove the popular adoption of application servers as everyone rushed to put up a website.”
Surviving Near-Death and “Remarkable” Recovery
However, perhaps no perspective hits harder than xqizit CEO Cameron Purdy‘s account of possibly Java’s darkest hour and subsequent resurrection. When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, “there were a total of zero engineers working on the Java platform at Sun,” he said. “The backlog of critical security bugs was huge, and some were already being actively exploited in the wild.”
What followed was nothing short of remarkable, he said.
“What that team pulled off over the next 15 years was nothing short of amazing,” Purdy added. “The first part of the slog was finding and fixing countless thousands of security flaws, which has to be some of the worst work to get stuck on.” Oracle not only stabilized the platform but implemented a new six-month release cadence that has kept Java evolving consistently.
“Oracle didn’t only ‘not kill it,’ but somehow actually delivered on the promise of responsible stewardship for the Java platform,” Purdy said, giving credit where it’s due despite his acknowledgement of Oracle’s mixed reputation in the developer community at the time.
The Open Source Advantage
Central to Java’s longevity has been its embrace of open source principles. Milinkovich emphasized the critical role of the open source community.
“The Apache Software Foundation, in particular, needs to be recognized as the home of many great Java projects, including Harmony (a key component of Android), Jakarta and Tomcat. The Eclipse Foundation contributed projects like the Eclipse IDE and Jetty.”
Years ago, Sun Microsystems coined the phrase “innovation happens elsewhere” and purposefully established Java as an open platform, he said. “They then furthered that when they open sourced Java and created the OpenJDK project. That model has stood the test of time, including surviving an acquisition and multiple licensing changes.”
Moreover, “Java continues to thrive today, thanks to a vibrant and innovative ecosystem including key elements like Android, Spring and Spring Boot, and multiple OpenJDK distributions such as Temurin,” Milinkovich added. “Jakarta EE has reinvigorated the enterprise Java space with multiple releases, a major uptick in vendor support, and a steady pipeline of innovation.”
Spring Framework’s Johnson noted, “The JVM has always allowed for new languages. It’s bigger than Java, and that in turn helps Java. The Java community has produced a lot of amazing open source software, which has helped create business value.”
Indeed, that value became apparent to the folks in this article who were able to build around their open source enterprise Java projects to make a lot of money.
For instance, Fleury, who had worked at Sun Microsystems, leveraged his open source JBoss Java application server project into a company (JBoss) that Red Hat acquired for $350 million. Johnson leveraged the Spring Framework into a company called SpringSource that VMware acquired. Oracle acquired Purdy’s company, Tangosol, to get its Coherence Java-based distributed cache and in-memory data grid, and made him SVP of development. Kersten leveraged his Mylyn Java-based task-focused framework to launch Tasktop, which Planview acquired.
Continuous Evolution and Backward Compatibility
Meanwhile, one of Java’s most impressive achievements has been its ability to evolve while maintaining compatibility with legacy code.
IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna summarized this.
“Java offers a rare combination of runtime stability, robust tooling, expansive developer ecosystem, and an unwavering commitment to backward compatibility. It has continuously evolved — embracing generics, lambdas, modularity and virtual threads — while maintaining coherence across its ecosystem,” he said.
“Java offers a rare combination of runtime stability, robust tooling, expansive developer ecosystem, and an unwavering commitment to backward compatibility. It has continuously evolved — embracing generics, lambdas, modularity and virtual threads — while maintaining coherence across its ecosystem.”
— Arnal Dayaratna, IDC analyst
Kersten called this a key factor in Java’s longevity.
“Backwards compatibility, under all the stewardship, including Oracle stewardship, there’s been amazing backwards compatibility. And because all our applications are so big and so challenging to maintain, this has been huge,” he said.
Kersten contrasts this with other platforms: “When you keep changing things, it’s very difficult for customers to really deal with those backwards compatible issues, whereas Java has done it and kept to it and kept their promises on that front.”
Cornwall echoed this sentiment.
“Despite significant language modernization, Java has done amazingly well at maintaining backward compatibility. Many class files that were created on early Java compilers will still run on today’s VMs.”
With a slightly different perspective, Chris Richardson, an Oakland, Calif.-based software architecture consultant and Java Champion — despite his background as a “former Lisper” — said he is disappointed with the overall pace of language design advances, yet he acknowledged that “Java has done a remarkable job of introducing ivory tower concepts (e.g., from Lisp), such as garbage collection, into a ‘blue collar language.’ After a period of stagnation prior to Java 8, the language has continued to evolve. So, while I am disappointed with the overall pace of advances in language design, Java is still my programming language of choice.”
Market Dynamics and Developer Perception
The balance between innovation and stability has required navigation of market forces. Brad Shimmin, an analyst at the Futurum Group, observes that “long-term success depends upon a multitude of factors. First, can the maintainers bring the language forward fast enough to keep up market trends while simultaneously providing enough backwards compatibility to keep customers happy —especially customers managing large codebases?”
However, this success has come with a perception challenge, said Cornwall.
“Among developers these days, Java is seen as a bit elderly, despite significant language modernization. That’s mostly because a larger share of Java development is routine maintenance of existing systems rather than greenfield development. As COBOL was for mainframes, Java is now a core pillar of cloud business,” he said.
“Among developers these days, Java is seen as a bit elderly, despite significant language modernization. That’s mostly because a larger share of Java development is routine maintenance of existing systems rather than greenfield development. As COBOL was for mainframes, Java is now a core pillar of cloud business.”
— Andrew Cornwall, Forrester analyst
The AI Challenge and Future Outlook
As Java enters its fourth decade, it faces perhaps its biggest test yet.
Newcomer warns that “the industry is undergoing a sea change as big, if not bigger, than the web in GenAI [generative AI]. This will be a huge test for Java going forward (i.e., whether Java can adapt to AI as well as other languages).”
Yet, Simon Ritter, deputy CTO at Azul, told The New Stack that Java is more than up to the challenge and may well unseat Python for AI development.
Despite this challenge, the outlook remains optimistic. Johnson said he believes “the future is bright. The JVM has a big role to play in the next wave of applications: unlocking the business value that GenAI can bring.”
The Eclipse Foundation’s Milinkovich shares this optimism.
“Looking forward to the next 30 years of Java, I am inspired by the innovation we continue to see in the ecosystem. I can vividly recall the many predictions of Java’s demise as new technologies have come to the forefront. But Java has continued to thrive in the world of cloud native computing, and we are seeing important AI-related projects written in Java as well.”
Indeed, Johnson has launched a revolutionary project called Embabel, which is an agent framework for the JVM.
In his blog post on the effort, Johnson acknowledged the power of Python in AI development and even asks: “Why not just write in Python?” noting that, “Python has been the dominant language for AI for the last few years. At this point, every developer needs to be fluent in Python. I’m glad that I am. However, AI is much broader than GenAI. Python offers a great ecosystem for broader AI, with TensorFlow, PyTorch and many other libraries.”
However, Johnson declares that “Much of the critical business logic in the world is running on the JVM, and for good reason. GenAI enabling it is of critical importance.”
Thus, “Embabel is an agent framework, initially for the JVM, that is intended not just to play catchup with Python agent frameworks, but to leapfrog them.”
“Embabel is an agent framework, initially for the JVM, that is intended not just to play catchup with Python agent frameworks, but to leapfrog them.”
— Rod Johnson, creator of the Spring Framework
Lessons in Longevity
What can other technologies learn from Java’s three-decade journey?
IDC’s Dayaratna captures the essence: “This ability to modernize without disrupting legacy code has made Java indispensable for mission-critical applications. Few languages can match that kind of pragmatic resilience,” he said.
Moreover, Purdy offers a sobering reminder about the fragility of even successful platforms while celebrating Java’s recovery: “Java’s longevity was never guaranteed,” but “what Java has delivered over the past decade has been amazing for such a mature platform and language.”
As Java just celebrated its 30th birthday, it stands as a testament to the power of open governance, community collaboration and the delicate balance between innovation and stability. While challenges remain — particularly in the rapidly evolving AI landscape — Java’s track record suggests it will continue adapting and thriving for some time to come.
The language that once promised to run anywhere has indeed run everywhere and shows no signs of slowing down.
