5 things we learned from James Governor | JAX London 2016

Take a look at our short interview with James Governor in which he reveals all about Java:

@smeyen challenges @monkchips to uncover the #java truth of it all! pic.twitter.com/s9eL5vRJda

— JAXenter.com (@JAXenterCOM) October 11, 2016

James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, the only developer-focused industry analyst firm, took the stage to open JAX London 2016. But before we dive into more details, let’s take a look at one tweet which summarizes the keynote beautifully:

. @monkchips very positive on Java, Jenkins & Spring boot at #jaxlondon, down on JavaEE & Scala, describes JS frameworks as a sh*t show

— Stephen Colebourne (@jodastephen) October 11, 2016

James Governor’s keynote was an ode to Java; he showed how web companies turn into Java shops as they mature and talked about the new world where players such as Lightbend, Spring, Netty, Dropwizard, Apache Spark, Play and Eclipse Vert.x play a huge role. He mentioned that we need new frameworks to keep Java going and gave a huge shout-out to Spring and Spring Boot.

James Governor opening keynote JAX London 2016

Highlight #1: We’re all foragers now

“Traditional software dev was like farming. You bought your tool stack and got busy. Now we’re more like foragers” @monkchips #jaxlondon pic.twitter.com/AvT4m6S42s

— Daniel Bryant (@danielbryantuk) October 11, 2016

Highlight #2: We need to invest in people

Highlight #3: Open source is the new normal

Highlight #4: Everyone should be using continuous integration in modern software development

“Everyone should be using continuous integration in modern software dev. Unfortunately not everyone got the memo” @monkchips #jaxlondon pic.twitter.com/sseWGIP9kv

— Daniel Bryant (@danielbryantuk) October 11, 2016

Highlight #5: The Tapas table metaphor — Break your monolithic team into small teams to build great things

Two pizza teams are so yesterday. Today, it’s Tapas table teams. @monkchips @jaxlondon

— Chris Richardson (@crichardson) October 11, 2016

Highlight #5: We need new frameworks to keep Java growing

The number of frameworks for #Java is continuously growing – @monkchips at #jaxlondon pic.twitter.com/zwf9cQCgpi

— Sebastian Meyen (@smeyen) October 11, 2016

Java has died and revived time and time again but how come it’s still here? According to James Governor, one of the most revealing hints is the fact that the world’s biggest web companies are turning to Java as they grow. Even the giants that think Java is obsolete and turn to the likes of Hadoop to solve their problems inevitably make use of Java at one point.

I’m not expecting Java to go anywhere

Finally, some words of wisdom for all the developers out there:

Code is not your competitive advantage.Your service offerings and data are the differentiator. Embrace open source.

More to come.