Java-Related Events And Trends To Watch In 2023 – Forbes

CEO of BellSoft. Accomplished expert in Java technology and IT leadership with over 10 years of experience.

Looking back at the main events of 2022 helps foresee upcoming trends and prepare your business for the best IT infrastructure of 2023. This article summarizes a few of the most evident global trends and technological events in Java that, in combination, will inform expectations for the Java software development industry in 2023.

Tougher Budgets For Innovation And More Demand For Efficiency

Inflation swept the globe in 2022, reaching 11% in the UK and 9% in the U.S. When inflation rises, companies always look to cut costs. It is clear that saving money will be among the driving forces for all industries this year, leading to tighter budgets and demands for higher productivity with fewer resources. The recent Google layoffs is just one example of what is happening to many companies. Other tech giants that started the year with layoff announcements include SAP, IBM, Spotify, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and more.

However, there are always alternatives to layoffs to cut costs and increase tech efficiency, especially since tech efficiency is more linked to development architecture and its components than people.

For Java, another component of higher economic pressure is the consequence of rising cloud costs. Cloud computing is the base of most software applications nowadays. It is a great environment and convenient for both users and businesses. However, the downside is the rising price of cloud operations. As reported by Flexera, with an increase in cloud infrastructure, enterprises experience increases in cloud costs and wasted cloud spending. Cloud spending waste averages about 32% of the cloud budget. Therefore, improving cloud management and cost-cutting are among companies’ top priorities in 2023.

Cloud cost management is not only a financial management challenge; it involves other specialists such as DevOps, FinOps and development architects to find the best possible solution. Part of the current trend is in cost cuts and better financial management of the cloud, but a large part of effective cost reduction lies in adapting Java to the cloud, which is explained in the next expected trend below.

Cloud-Native Java Evolution

Java is among the most popular programming languages. As with any other modern programming code today, it is heavily used in the cloud environment. Java in the cloud is not simple to manage because it was not initially designed for the cloud and needs adaptation.

To make your cloud Java application highly efficient, flexible, quick and low-cost to run, you should build it with cloud-native components. The race for a better fit of Java to the cloud continues in 2023, and some events of 2022 deliver us new expectations for 2023. Among them are:

• The Spring Native 6.0 GA and Spring Boot 3.0 releases in 2022 that initially launched a new framework generation. Spring 6.0 focuses on ahead-of-time transformations, enhancing native image support for Spring 6.0 applications. Spring Native 6.0 updates in 2023 are among the news expected by the Java community.
• The Oracle announcement to move portions of the GraalVM Community Edition Java code and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilers to OpenJDK. That will take place in 2023. This event signifies closer affiliation between GraalVM and Java technology development.
• The Virtual Threads (2nd preview) in JDK 20 preview in March 2023 will be focused on better scaling, thread API adoption of virtual threads with minimal changes and easier troubleshooting, debugging and profiling for virtual threads.
• In 2023, we expect large-scale adoption of Lambdas for Java, all due to a new feature for the AWS Lambda project—Lambda SnapStart—that was introduced in 2022. SnapStart improves startup latency and is important for software applications that use synchronous APIs, interactive microservices or data processing.

Security In OpenJDK

In the last decade, we observed exponential popularity for all open-source products. According to the Synopsys Analyst Report, 97% of applications implement open-source code.

Intense use of open-source code, libraries and software also need to be viewed from the other side—a growing security concern. A single software application might contain hundreds of code files, binaries and parts of libraries, all of them from different sources. To ensure application security, you need to be certain that the software vendor knows which components are used in its application and has all the binary verifications and security of the overall chain confirmed.

We already saw greater attention to security in open source and OpenJDK in 2022. OpenJDK vendors are releasing new security products, and we foresee that the trend toward higher security standards will continue evolving in 2023. Responsible IT users will implement OpenJDK software from a vendor rather than taking code from open repositories. OpenJDK vendor products meet industry security standards and are delivered with tech support.

The other important topic in the Java ecosystem is the continuous rise of containers and their safety. Containers carry many mechanisms to improve cloud-native architecture, including, for example, speeding up infrastructure and app configurations as one of the critical business metrics for perfect app running.

However, as stated in the 2022 Sysdig Cloud-Native Threat Report, the safety of containers is often compromised. Based upon automated analysis of over 250,000 Linux container images available in Docker Hub, the report identified 1,777 images as malicious. Linux containers are among the most popular for building apps, and the safety of these and other containers will be the focus of further improvements and checks in 2023. Containers with advanced security are already getting released, with the latest case being Alpaquita Linux.

In addition to the three main market demands mentioned above, there are, of course, many other improvements happening in the industry. However, they are all linked to or originating from these three main drivers.

Establishing a good business strategy includes a close review of past results, helping identify ongoing trends and restructuring your IT strategy to a more flexible approach that corresponds to the current market conditions as well as overcomes past disadvantages. Noting the expected Java trends and including them in the business routine is a must if your software is Java-based.

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