A few months ago, we began an incredible journey into the world of Java through a compelling retrospective written in collaboration with Danilo Ventura, Senior Software Engineer at Bitrock.

Enjoy the fourth and last episode following below!

In 2014 a revolutionary new version of Java arrived. All versions of Java are backward compatible, meaning that sources generated with a new version of Java are executable on older Java VMs. This revolutionary version of Java 8 allows for a leap in functional languages. So come many new tools such as streams, lambda expressions, optionals to write more functional code using both the object-oriented paradigm and the functional paradigm. Java 8 was really a milestone because it gave birth to new constructs and many Java developers took years to get used to it.

The first Java application framework like Spring Boot

From now on, Java is used to create services and for web applications. The first Java frameworks begin to emerge to quickly create applications that provide Rest Json services. For convenience, we will mention only the most important one: Spring Boot. The latter is based on a leaner library that was precisely Spring (launched in 2016) and made developers’s life easier allowing not to use the complex EJBs but to create JARs able to self-execute, without installing a server and running it.

Cloud, Container and Docker

It is precisely with this in mind that a new revolution takes place, that of the cloud and containers. Before, servers and their maintenance were 'in house' - just think of banks and insurance companies; right around this time, the concept of Cloud was born mainly with giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft providing the necessary tools to create 'machines' on the web where you can install everything you need to run your website or web application. In this way, all the maintenance of the '(virtual) machine' is entrusted to the Cloud Manager.

The other major aspect is the container, since it changes the way applications are distributed. The distribution, indeed, is now published through a container that can be basically seen as a 'machine' with an operating system inside and a container executor called Docker that guarantees the security and functionality of the application.

“Write once, run anywhere (WORA)” or not?

All of this shakes the concept and motto of Java: "Write once, run anywhere". If the application can be distributed in a container with the preferred operating system, what are the advantages of still using Java? Indeed, there are none and this is precisely the reason why new and alternative languages emerged such as Rust and Google's GO whose container takes 5 milliseconds to start - instead of Java, which needs 30 seconds.

It seems like Java in this Cloud Native world would have no future. Actually, it was not true. Along comes a super revolutionary technology in Java: the GraalVM, which allows native code to be generated from bytecode of any type. So a bytecode starting from a source of any type - Java, C - is created for a special virtual machine which is precisely the GraalVM capable of generating an executable file for a given operating system. Why is it revolutionary? Java can be used to create a container with an executable in it that can start in times comparable to services written in GO.

Java continues to move forward by adapting to new frameworks that allow services to be written directly cloud-native. For instance, one noteworthy framework is Quarkus, which allows the generation of cloud-native containers that can run on Docker or any container orchestrator.

The new frontier of Web 3.0

We are on the threshold of Web 3.0, and the new frontier is the blockchain-based web. Perspectives are starting to change and new architectures are being released: server-side, there will no longer be a single server managed by a platform. Just to give you an example: YouTube is run by Google, owned by Google, and the videos that are uploaded are on Google's servers as well as owned by Google.

With Web 3.0, the perspective changes, since the platform is not owned by a single owner anymore, but distributed on the blockchain.

In line with the times and needs, the Web continues to evolve while facing many difficulties and uncertainties. How will Java adapt to this new type of architecture? We will see! In the meantime, we can say that we are not standing still but moving with this evolution; there are already several pieces of evidence, such as new framework libraries (e.g. Spring) that allow interaction with popular blockchains.

We have come to the end of this fourth and final episode of the retrospective dedicated to Java. We thank Danilo Ventura for sharing his valuable insights on Java technologies and wrapping up 20 years of web history.

You can also read the first, second and third parts. Follow us on LinkedIn and stay tuned for upcoming interesting technology articles on our blog!

A few months ago, we began an incredible journey into the world of Java through a compelling retrospective written in collaboration with Danilo Ventura, Senior Software Engineer at Bitrock. We can move on with our narrative by depicting what happened in the mid- and late-2000s as well as highlighting the developments of Java with the advent of Web 2.0 .

Back in early 2005 there was a major revolution that kicked off what has been called Web 2.0. What is it? Web 2.0 is the revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a platform. It’s an improved version of the first world wide web, characterized specifically by the change from static to dynamic or user-generated content and also the growth of social media like, for instance, the first one that was YouTube to publish video. Starting from these years, the web begins to transform itself into a container of platforms.

Ajax and JSON

What was the technical evolution that allowed this to happen? New browsers like Firefox and Chrome took advantage of a new technology called Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) which allowed for asynchronous calls. What does it mean? Browsers launch a request and while the response arrives another request can be launched.  All this makes web pages more interactive and faster. Pages populate as long as requests are completed. It also changes the very structure of web applications because you no longer have to provide the entire page but only the data.
The web application development changed and new frameworks were based on Javascript. Between 2005 and 2010 came the first JavaScript library for web applications distributed as a free software: jQuery. Later came more powerful frameworks for open source web applications such as AngularJs up to Angular 2 and React JS.

Hence, server-side applications become just data providers. The new interchange of data between client/server applications was based on JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. This was an open standard file format and data interchange format that used human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute-value pairs and arrays (or other serialisable values).

Java and the Mobile Operating Systems

In 2008, the first commercial Android device was unveiled: this was another important moment for Java. Android is an operating system that basically runs programs that are written in Java and compiled by a Dalvik virtual machine that is able to take this Java code and turn it into the bytecode that is then executed by the Android operating systems. The competitor Apple developed iOS, a parallel proprietary operating system, while Google based everything on Android and the open source language of Java. One more time, Java played a major role as a programming language to write mobile applications.

Criticism of Java

In 2010, the largest database software and technology company Oracle acquired Sun Microsystem, consequently Java became property of Oracle. What changed? Java became a proprietary language and only the latest version remained free. For older versions you still have to go through Java distributors. 

Later the Java programming language and Java software platform were criticized by the developer communities for design choices, including the implementation of generics, forced object-oriented programming. New high-level programming languages have been designed to fully interoperate with the Java Virtual Machine version. We can mention Scala released in 2004 as well as Kotlin in 2011.

We have to wait until 2014 for another revolutionary version of Java.

You can also read the first, second and forth parts. Follow us on LinkedIn and stay tuned for upcoming interesting technology articles on our blog!

Thanks to Danilo Ventura for the valuable contribution to this article series.

A few months ago, we began an incredible journey into the world of Java through a compelling retrospective written in collaboration with Danilo Ventura, Senior Software Engineer at Bitrock. We can move on in our narrative by depicting what happened in the early 2000s.

From Java Server Pages to eXtensible markup language

We saw that Java servlets allowed higher degrees of interactivity and dynamicity in web design. Yet, a significant limitation still existed. Servers could only produce static HTML pages, with no variable elements. Inside a Servlet you had to write all the code of each html page putting together variable data (for example coming from a DB) and static data. 

To simplify the process, in 1999 Sun Microsystems released the first version of a new revolutionary technology: Java Server Pages (JSP).  With JSP  pages it was possible to insert in a HTML page, scripting section parts in java language, creating a “JSP page”. JSP was translated into Servlet and then compiled. With Java Server Pages and servlets led to the birth of server-side pages. This means that pages were no longer static (steady and immutable as website creators thought them): on the contrary, they were dynamically generated on the server side, using the JSP as a template with dynamic contents inside. 

We’ve come to the early 2000s: during these years, the first Java frameworks to write web applications emerge. The most relevant ones we must mention are Velocity (a template engine, rather than a framework), Struts and then Struts2. Tools like these were the first attempts to apply the M.V.C. pattern in web application development. Struts and Struts2 were based on XML (“eXtensible markup language”), which was designed to be a human and machine-readable markup language for handling data transport. XML was born as an exchange format for data but it was also (ab)used as a configuration language.

The Enterprise Java Beans and the Web 1.0 age

The evolution of distributed applications still lacked and it could be achieved only thanks to another Java technology: Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). We can now describe EJB as an architecture for setting up program components, written in the Java programming language, that run in the server parts of a computer network that uses the client/server model.

EJB was a very powerful, complex and also widely used technology. Enterprise Java Beans were based on application servers: we are no longer talking about simple servers or servlet engines. In order to execute EJB, developers required application servers that had an entire substrate (called EJB Container) thanks to which, whenever the application was deployed, a wide array of runtime components was generated, creating an actual ecosystem that allows the application to interact with server resources. Many Software houses, at that time, had its own product of EJB Application Server: WebSphere from IBM, Weblogic from BEA Systems (later acquired by Oracle), and, of course, were present open source products too such as JBoss, Apache TomEE and GlassFish.

Developing applications for this technology was rather complicated, IT since professionals had to deal not only with code writing operations, but also with repetitive actions: launching programs, packaging the application in a certain way, having the correct library dependencies for the projects and so on. All these tasks were done manually: as you can imagine, the chance of error was particularly high. Moreover, it was a huge waste of time (that could be dedicated to development) for developers to generate all these packages that would be deployed on application servers.

This led to the creation of new tools able to solve these needs, starting from Ant. Ant was a very innovative tool since, always through XML, it was possible to write procedures to be executed inside the Java world. Through an Ant script in XML, you could run a sequence of operations, such as copying and filing out files, moving some parts to a specific folder, creating a Java archive from that folder and moving it elsewhere. It was thus possible to automate a number of tasks.

Ant arrived in 2002, followed by Maven in 2004 (which is still used nowadays). Last but not least, Gradle appeared around 2012. Maven, now, allows a java developer to manage all dependencies and the lifecycle of its application in a standard way. All these tools, by solving a series of issues, have been essential to guarantee Java survival, otherwise it would have gone extinct.

In the early 2000s - the Web 1.0 age - there were some alternatives to Java. Some examples? PHP, C#, and Microsoft .NET (the Microsoft technology for building Web Applications in Windows environments).

This was also the glorious time of other technologies that were presumed to have an explosive success. Starting from Adobe Flash. At the time, if you didn’t have a Flash animation on your website, you were basically considered a loser! For this reason, Adobe launched this technology that allowed programmers to create, thanks to a language mainly based on Javascript and XML, a code that was executed from the browsers through a proper HTML tag that was generated.

Java 5

2004 was a breakthrough year, marked by the arrival of a version of Java that is still considered game-changing for many aspects: Java 5. Java 5 showed some new features, i.e. generics (taken from C language), annotations, enumerations, varargs, static imports. Sun Microsystem’s programmers and the Java communities, indeed, realized that in those years evolutions were fast-paced and, if they wanted to remain competitive and make Java a modern language, they would have to introduce additional features.

Not being a static language and continuously evolving through time, was the trump card that made Java survive in the long run. Through the implementation of new features, developers' needs have always been responded to. Java, as a matter of fact, is open-source: all Java developers can download the sources and can manifest within the community which features they would like to be implemented. Even then, the developer community, when talking about the implementation of new features, put it up to the vote.

In those years service-based architectures also began to evolve and companies started realizing that the mainframe was likely to fade away soon. However, there was the need within companies to maintain data sharing available through services.

At this stage, we begin to have problems and questions, like for instance, how do we exchange data? Which language do we use to make different technologies interact with each other? How do we restructure data? Then XML becomes established as an exchange language allowing to structure and to control data.

The first service-oriented architecture (SOA) arose based on a SOAP protocol able to exchange data among multiple technologies and in different formats. Between 2006 - 2009, new solutions, for more complex situations, were implemented, such as, for instance,  enterprise service bus (ESB), that resolves in a brilliant way the point to point communication problem for different software technologies.

Java is part of this revolution and is no longer just a language for web application, but is evolving to follow the new requirements of the server world.

You can also read the first, third and forth parts. Follow us on LinkedIn and stay tuned for upcoming interesting technology articles on our blog!

Thanks to Danilo Ventura for the valuable contribution to this article series.