A new report from Forrester Research about the future of Java predicts that large enterprise customers will stick with Java, but the open source community will look elsewhere to fill their development needs.
John R. Rymer, one of the report’s authors, said that while the immediate impact of Oracle’s decisions to alienate the open source community will have minimum impact on customers, in the next decade they will have greater impact.
Oracle’s approach to managing Java is a top-down one. Rymer predicted that the Java Community Process will eventually be replaced with something that is completely controlled by Oracle and IBM.
As Oracle asserts its control over Java there will be an open source exodus, and Rhymer said, it will result in fewer young developers learning Java first.
“One of Java’s greatest strengths has been the number of young developers who learn it as a first language. As Java becomes less and less of a client-side language, we expect to see educational institutions switch to other languages for primary education, ones with stronger client-side representation such as JavaScript and HTML 5,” he predicted. “Over time, developers will begin to view Java as a server-side language for enterprises–like COBOL.”
Smaller companies, Rymer said, will gravitate toward “good enough” open platform solutions such as LAMP, JavaScript and HTML 5 open standards.
