If you’re at all interested in Java and where it’s going, you owe it to yourself to check out the discussion from the very thoughtful roundtable of Java experts assembeled over at IBM developerWorks by Jenni Aloi and Athen O’Shea (both former JavaWorld editors — we miss you!). Nine different Java developers contributed, all of whom had intriguing things to say. These were spread out over a number of different topics; a few themes of interest to me, anyway: Complexity. Alex Miller: “A typical Java Web app uses 15 or 20 MB of frameworks before you can even start writing code! Getting started with this mess of stuff is daunting to me, and I have a decade of Java development experience.”JVM languages. Neal Ford: “The Java language designers should just freeze Java at version 7. Java the language will become like the assembly language of the JVM: a place to go for low-level access, because you are writing a low-level library, and for maintenance.”Modularity and its future: Alex Miller: “I think the entire process around JSR 294, 277, and Project Jigsaw has been a mess from the beginning. The people involved are universally smart and well-intentioned, yet I have little hope that the final outcome will be something that I want to use.”Open source Java implementations: Rick Hightower: “OpenJDK and Apache Harmony are like safety parachutes. I am glad they both exist; I hope I never have to use either of them. I hope Oracle is a good steward of the Java platform and that we don’t have to rely on the backup plan.”I could quote it endlessly (especially the whole section on JVM languages, which is quite smart), but you really ought to check it out for yourself! Software Development