Java: The Legend

Chapter 4. Java Developers and the Ecosystem

Don’t listen to Hollywood. That’s good advice under most circumstances, but when thinking about technology it’s particularly true. The movies would have you believing that tech is all about individual intellectual endeavor.

In fact, the practice of technology has always been a social activity. Even before mass adoption of free and open-source software, the sharing of code and ideas was already a central feature of technology culture.

So it comes as no surprise that any sufficiently advanced technology tends to develop an ecosystem and community alongside it. Once again, Java is both unexceptional, in that a developer ecosystem grew up around it, and exceptional, because that ecosystem evolved into something quite unlike any other language and platform community.

Overview of the Java Ecosystem

Java’s reach encompasses, by most estimates, at least 10 million programmers. This gives it one of the largest and most important developer communities of all. Only the Web/Javascript communities (and arguably C/C++) come near to the size of the Java community.

For serious, safe application development, Java is pretty close to being the only game in town. It’s a robust and stable platform, but despite its size and reputation for solidity, Java does, at times, suffer from an image problem. Being a competent, practical language does not necessarily endear the language to people who are used to working with it all day, every day.

Another issue is ...