adam bien's blog

2019 Predictions 📎

  1. Oracle's move to opensource the entire JDK with tooling (even Java Mission Control) opened the market for third party companies like e.g. Amazon, RedHat or Azul Systems to provide support. Also innovations like GraalVM keep Java interesting. Java popularity in OpenSource and Tiobe Language index should grow in 2019.
  2. Serverless / Function as a Service is a fine-grained (Message Driven Bean / Command Pattern - like), interaction model. FaaS is widely overused, which causes complex applications to be designed as distributed command pattern architecture. Such applications are hard to build, deploy, debug and profile. It might be too early for a backlash, but I would expect at least some conference talks with titles like: "How to survive FaaS".
  3. Kotlin is the programming language of choice for android development, what also helps with general adoption. Kotlin could become more popular in 2019, except Google manages to release Fuchsia and Flutter and does not push Dart.
  4. There is no logical explanation for building and deploying megabyte-sized WARs/JARs, when only a few kB change in each iteration. ThinWARs gained popularity in 2018, in 2019 they could become even more popular. Making microprofile available on stock Java EE 8 application servers, makes the deployment units even smaller (microdeployments), faster and so more productive.
  5. Frequent releases, interesting innovation, conference presence will make microprofile even more popular.
  6. Jakarta EE is gaining momentum and the project makes significant progress. The availability of jakartablogs.ee, JNoSQL and Eclipse GlassFish 5.1.0 will keep Jakarta EE in the news.
  7. There is a common perception, that MicroProfile only works on esoteric runtimes. However, most "stock" application servers support Java EE 8 and MicroProfile without any additional setup, download or configuration. The popularity of Java EE / Jakarta EE + MicroProfile (fusion) should grow in 2019.
  8. After private cloud offerings (shipping servers to datacenters) Amazon's Outpost, Google's GKE, Microsoft's Azure Stack, private clouds should become more popular in 2019. I was too early with the predictions 10 years ago, but now you can buy private clouds from public cloud vendors.
  9. Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and others committed to use MDN as the canonical resource to describing WebStandards and Web API. The general availability of WebComponents, Service Workers, Grid Layout, Fetch API, WebSockets, and ES 6 modules makes JavaScript frameworks optional. In 2019 I expect more projects moving away from JavaScript frameworks into vanilla WebStandards.
  10. The innovation in Java and frequent train releases, will make other JVM languages like e.g. Scala, Clojure less popular.
  11. The use of external frameworks will further decrease in enterprise. Netflix stopped developing Hystrix, which will force many enterprise projects to migrate away from massive Hystrix-boilerplate code, to either MicroProfile Fault Tolerance or resilience4j. Because the ecosystem is so rich, I expect more projects to collapse. 2019 could become the year of YAGNI.
  12. Microsoft discontinued Edge and is going to use chromium what is a big move towards WebStandards in enterprise projects and also a reason to refactor exising projects by removing optional frameworks.
  13. kubernetes became the de-facto standard orchestrator. OpenShift is a popular kubernetes distribution, which is already surprisingly well adopted within enterprises. In 2019 OpenShift could gain further adoption, also driven by the IBM's acquisition of RedHat.
see also my 2018 predictions. 2018 predictions were already revisited in: 58th airhacks.tv