Java.net Year-End Polls: Looking Back at 2011 and Ahead to 2012

Java.net is ending 2011 and starting 2012 with polls that give developers an opportunity to express what Java/JVM related events, news, or happenings they consider to have been the most important in 2011, and what they predict will be most important in 2012. The first poll (about 2011) closed this past Friday, with 520 votes being cast. The exact question and results were:

The most important Java/JVM related happening in 2011 was:

• 38% (199 votes) - Java 7 release
• 13% (65 votes) - JavaFX open sourcing and plan for eventual operation on Mac and Linux
• 11% (55 votes) - Clarified, well-defined Java roadmap toward Java 8 and Java 9
• 1% (5 votes) - JCP.next and new JCP openness
• 1% (7 votes) - Increased global Java User Group prominence and activity
• 2% (12 votes) - Continued emergence of Cloud Computing
• 22% (113 votes) - Growth of Android
• 5% (26 votes) - I don't know
• 7% (38 votes) - Other

While I'm not surprised that the Java 7 release received the most votes, I didn't expect "Growth of Android" to be the second place vote getter. In terms of headlines, it seems like "Cloud Computing" gets a lot of publicity in comparision with Android -- but, in a way, not a real lot "happened" in terms of notable, definable progress with respect to the cloud in 2011 (at JavaOne, much of the Java EE discussion was related to preparing for the cloud once the marketplace begins to cohere to a single definition of what "the cloud" is, how it's structured, etc.); so this may explain why "Continued emergence of Cloud Computing" received a meager 2% share of the voting.

A couple of the options that are near and dear for me, "JCP.next and new JCP openness" and "Increased global Java User Group prominence," were considered most important by almost no one. But then, the prompt was asking people to select a single "most important" item for all of 2011 -- thinking about it that way, with other options that directly affect developers on a daily basis at their jobs, it makes sense that these two options wouldn't receive many votes.

Thirty-eight voters selected "Other," but none of them chose to leave a comment telling us what they were thinking...

New poll: predicted most important Java/JVM news / event in 2012

It's generally agreed that 2011 was a great year for Java and languages that run on the JVM. Our new poll asks you to respond to the prompt The most important Java/JVM news/event/happening in 2012 will be related to... Voting will be open until January 6, 2012.

java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted new java.net blogs:

• Java Champion Dr. Heinz Kabutz posted his first Java.net blog, What is the meaning of life?;
• Manfred Riem, Using multiple different containers for integration testing; and
• John Ferguson Smart, Faster Web Tests with Parallel Batches in Thucydides.

Articles

Our latest java.net article is SWELL - An English-Like DSL for Swing Testing by Sanjay Dasgupta and Chirantan Kundu.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

• Shai Almog presents One Code. All Devices. No Compromises!;
• Geertjan Wielenga illustrates NetBeans Property Editors for java.io.File and String Arrays;
• Dustin Marx demonstrates Guava Release 11's IntMath;
• Dustin Marx presents a JavaFX 2.0 Christmas Tree (JavaFX 2.0 Shapes);
• Geertjan Wielenga talks about Reusing a Spring Configuration File in the NetBeans Platform;
• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine presents Some JMS and OpenMQ for the holidays;
• Markus Eisele presents Moving Java Forward? A definition. A year in review.;
• Dustin Marx discusses Java 7's ThreadLocalRandom;
• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine provides links to New Parleys content - Devoxx 2011, Java EE 7, migrating to EE 6, CDI best practices, and more;
• Jean-Francois Arcand describes Writing WebSocket Clients using AsyncHttpClient;
• Vikram Goyal has a new article, Updating Java ME Applications; and
• Adam Bien describes How to Compile Java FX 2 Applications with Maven 3.

Spotlights

Our latest java.net href="http://www.java.net/archive/spotlight">Spotlight is Alex Handy's Look what 2011 washed in: The return of Java:

It's back! After a long hiatus and seemingly endless dithering by Sun, Oracle has officially given Java the kick in the pants it needed. The language that took five revisions just to get generics is no longer the odd language out...

Before that we featured Markus Eisele's The Heroes of Java: Rod Johnson:

Rod Johnson is the father of Spring, which grew out of his influential book, “Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development,” which initiated the “lightweight” transformation of enterprise Java. Rod co-founded SpringSource, where he served as CEO until its 2009 acquisition by VMware, where he is now a Senior Vice President...

Prior to that was Mark Reinhold's Project Jigsaw: Bringing the big picture into focus -

I've started drafting an overview of the current state of our work
on Project Jigsaw. Ultimately this will be a fairly long
document, but in order to start getting feedback as early possible I've
published the first part on its own. This initial installment covers
design principles, basic definitions, and module declarations; still to
come are...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham

Twitter: @kevin_farnham