Azul is a company focused purely on Java through builds of OpenJDK, in the form of Platform Core, and our high-performance Java platform (including JVM), Platform Prime.  We build on these with Intelligence Cloud to deliver precise information about security vulnerabilities in running code, unused code and an inventory of all JVMs in use. 

When looking at expanding the company through acquisition, we obviously wanted to maintain that dedication to all things Java, so what better company than Payara? 

Before we get into the details of what's happening, let's look at a little Java history. 

A Little Java History

In 1999, Sun Microsystems announced the creation of three Java Editions: Micro, Standard and Enterprise.  Micro Edition was intended for devices, Standard Edition (SE) was the core platform, and Enterprise Edition was for server-side applications.  Java Enterprise Edition (EE) consisted of a set of specifications providing a simplified way to develop business logic and web page components.  This initially consisted of Servlets and Java Server Pages, for rendering client HTML and Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs).  EJBs came in two flavours: Session Beans for business logic and Entity Beans for persistent data (typically for mapping to a database). 

Since then, Java EE has gone through multiple revisions, adding a plethora of functionality through a wide range of APIs.  Since 2019, it has also been known as Jakarta EE; this was the result of Oracle moving Java EE specification development to the Eclipse Foundation.  Oracle did not want to allow the use of the Java trademark, so the name was changed. 

A key part of Java EE is the use of an application server that provides a managed runtime for the servlets and EJBs. The application server offers great flexibility in how Java application components can be both developed and deployed (really, this was the forerunner to the idea of microservices). 

Another important aspect of Enterprise Java history was Sun's decision, in 2005, to open-source its application server.  Now known as GlassFish, it also became the reference implementation for the Java EE and, subsequently, Jakarta EE specifications.  This is much the same as the way the OpenJDK project is the reference implementation for the Java SE specification. 

Since acquiring Sun Microsystems, Oracle has made several strategic decisions regarding different parts of the Java platform.  One of those was moving the standard to the Eclipse Foundation, as already mentioned.  Prior to that, in 2014, Oracle announced it would no longer offer commercial support for GlassFish, concentrating on its own application server, WebLogic, for customers. 

Which brings us to Payara. 

Payara and Azul

To quote from the Payara website:  

"Enterprises often face the challenge of running mission-critical Java applications with reliability and support.  Payara started as an open source, production-ready, fully supported application server to meet that need." 

This is the same model as Azul uses for our Platform Core product: an open-source, production-ready, fully supported build of OpenJDK. 

We see many synergies between how Payara supports Jakarta EE applications and how Azul supports the JDK. We see that we work in the Java ecosystem in the same ways, with the same collaborative culture, via open ecosystems and active participation in developer conferences, Java User Groups, and community platforms, such as Foojay.io, the place for friends of OpenJDK, where both Azul and Payara have been actively collaborating for several years.  

We also see opportunities to help customers optimise the performance of their Jakarta EE applications through Azul's Platform Prime.  As such, Azul has announced that it is acquiring Payara to extend our Java support offerings. 

The diagram below shows how the various components fit together in a broader enterprise Java market. 

These are exciting times, so stay tuned for more updates as we move forward!

Full press release is here: https://www.azul.com/newsroom/azul-acquires-payara-strengthening-leadership-in-enterprise-java-solutions/

The post More Java From Azul! appeared first on foojay.

Dynamic JVM Language Adds Server-Sent Events, JDBC Cache Store, and AST Generation Capabilities

Houston, TX – November 7, 2025 – Ortus Solutions announced the release of BoxLang 1.7.0, a major update to its modern dynamic language for the JVM that delivers enterprise-grade capabilities for building real-time, horizontally scalable, and AI-driven applications.

This release introduces native Server-Sent Events (SSE) for real-time streaming, JDBC-powered distributed caching, Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) programmatic access, and bytecode compatibility versioning—alongside extensive performance optimizations across the runtime.

Real-Time Streaming with Server-Sent Events

The centerpiece of this release is full Server-Sent Events (SSE) integration via a new SSE() built-in function and an enhanced Emitter system. These additions empower developers to build real-time, event-driven applications such as AI chatbots, live analytics dashboards, progress streams, and notification services.

Version 1.8 will extend this with an upcoming SSEConsumer() API, enabling runtime-to-runtime event consumption for distributed systems.

// Stream analytics data in real time
SSE(
    callback : ( emitter ) => {
        var startTime = now();
        while ( !emitter.isClosed() && dateDiff( "s", startTime, now() ) < 300 ) {
            emitter.send({
                activeUsers : getActiveUserCount(),
                requestsPerSecond : getCurrentRPS(),
                avgResponseTime : getAvgResponseTime(),
                timestamp : now()
            }, "metrics");
            sleep(5000);
        }
        emitter.close();
    },
    async : true,
    keepAliveInterval : 15000
);

The implementation includes async execution, automatic keep-alive, client disconnect detection, CORS support, and automatic chunking for messages exceeding 32KB—ensuring efficient, resilient streaming at scale.

// Stream AI responses token by token
SSE(
    callback : ( emitter ) => {
        var response = callAIService();
        while ( !emitter.isClosed() && response.hasMoreTokens() ) {
            emitter.send( response.getNextToken(), "token" );
        }
        emitter.send({ complete : true }, "done");
    },
    async : true,
    keepAliveInterval : 30000,
    timeout : 300000
);

Enterprise-Ready Distributed Caching

BoxLang 1.7.0 debuts the JDBC Cache Store, a robust distributed caching solution that enables shared caches across multiple BoxLang instances using enterprise databases such as Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Derby, HSQLDB, and SQLite.

// boxlang.json
{
  "caches": {
    "distributedCache": {
      "provider": "BoxCache",
      "properties": {
        "objectStore": "JDBCStore",
        "datasource": "myDatasource",
        "table": "boxlang_cache",
        "autoCreate": true,
        "maxObjects": 1000,
        "evictionPolicy": "LRU"
      }
    }
  }
}

The JDBC store includes automatic schema creation, database-specific SQL optimization, eviction policy support (LRU, LFU), and Base64 object serialization for complex types. All cache stores now implement isDistributed() for ecosystem introspection.

Advanced Code Analysis with BoxAST()

Developers can now access BoxLang’s internal Abstract Syntax Tree through the new BoxAST() built-in function. This feature supports the creation of linters, formatters, migration tools, and refactoring utilities—making it invaluable for static analysis and CFML-to-BoxLang transitions.

// Parse BoxLang code
ast = BoxAST( source : "x = 1 + 2; y = x * 3;" );

// Or use the convenient member method
ast = "function hello() { return 'world'; }".toAST();

// Parse from files
ast = BoxAST( filepath : "myScript.bx" );

// Return as JSON for external tools
astJson = BoxAST(
    source : "function hello() { return 'world'; }",
    returnType : "json"
);

// Parse CFML code for migration tools
cfAst = BoxAST(
    source : "<cfset x = 1><cfoutput>#x#</cfoutput>",
    sourceType : "cftemplate"
);

BoxAST() supports BoxLang script and template syntax, as well as CFML/ColdFusion code parsing for migration purposes, returning structured, JSON, or text output.

Bytecode Compatibility Versioning

To enhance module stability and cross-version reliability, BoxLang now implements bytecode compatibility versioning, ensuring that compiled artifacts remain consistent and reusable across multiple runtime releases—a major improvement for module authors and enterprise teams maintaining large applications.

Performance & Stability Enhancements

Version 1.7.0 delivers substantial runtime performance boosts, including:

• ⚡ Faster Scheduled Tasks via optimized concurrent maps
• 🚀 Improved Static Initializers for class loading
• 💾 Optimized ASM Bytecode Generation eliminating intermediate disk writes
• 🔁 Cache Store Enhancements across all providers

Additionally, over 40 bug fixes improve database interaction, file handling, HTTP services, CFML compatibility, and Windows platform support.

Open and Professional Ecosystem

BoxLang follows a professional open-source model with three editions: Open Source (Apache 2.0), BoxLang+, and BoxLang++.
The open-source core remains free, while commercial tiers provide support, advanced modules, and enterprise tooling—licensed fairly based on usage, not infrastructure.

New BoxLang+ exclusive modules include:

• 🧠 bx-redis – High-performance Redis integration
• 📊 bx-csv – Advanced CSV processing
• 🔐 bx-ldap – LDAP directory services
• 📈 bx-spreadsheet – Excel file operations
• 📄 bx-pdf – PDF generation

Future roadmap modules include bx-couchbase, bx-mongodb, and bx-elasticsearch.

Availability & Resources

BoxLang 1.7.0 is available now via:

• BoxLang Quick Installers (Mac, Linux, Windows)
• BoxLang Version Manager (BVM)
• Maven Central
• Direct download: boxlang.io/download

📘 Release Notes: BoxLang 1.7.0
📰 Full Blog Post: BoxLang v1.7.0 Overview
💻 Try Online: try.boxlang.io
📚 Documentation: boxlang.ortusbooks.com

About BoxLang

BoxLang is a next-generation, dynamic JVM language that runs seamlessly across multiple environments—desktop, web, cloud, serverless, and embedded systems. It combines the best features of Java, CFML, Python, Ruby, Go, and PHP to deliver a modern, expressive, and functional syntax with full Java interoperability.

With native capabilities for scheduling, asynchronous execution, event-driven programming, task management, and modular architecture, BoxLang functions as both a language and a framework, serving as a replacement for legacy CFML engines like Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee.

About Ortus Solutions

Ortus Solutions is a leader in modern software development for the JVM ecosystem. The company builds innovative frameworks, tools, and languages, including BoxLang, ColdBox MVC, and CommandBox CLI, which power thousands of applications globally.

🌐 www.ortussolutions.com

Media Contact
Ortus Solutions, Corp.
📧 info@ortussolutions.com
🌍 www.ortussolutions.com
🧩 boxlang.io | github.com/ortus-boxlang/boxlang

The post BoxLang 1.7.0 Delivers Streaming, Distributed Caching, and Enhanced JVM Performance appeared first on foojay.

Joining Forces to Advance Kotlin Performance

Azul and JetBrains have joined forces with a shared vision: to reexamine how Kotlin-generated bytecode interacts with the Java runtime (known as a Java Virtual Machine or JVM) and uncover new paths to improve application performance.

By combining Azul’s deep expertise in the JVM and application performance, with Kotlin’s precise control over bytecode generation, the collaboration creates a unique opportunity to optimize the entire execution stack for modern applications. While Kotlin is a cross-platform, general-purpose high-level programming language designed to interoperate fully with the JVM, runtime performance and scalability are derived predominantly from the JVM.

By leveraging the proven performance of Azul Platform Prime, which includes the Zing JDK incorporating Azul’s Falcon LLVM-based JIT compiler and C4 garbage collector, Kotlin web and server-side applications can see a demonstrable performance improvement. When comparing Kotlin applications on Azul Platform Prime vs. off-the-shelf OpenJDK using the TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks, Azul Platform Prime reduced latencies by 23.9% and improved throughput by as much as 30.5%.

For more details on the benchmark methodology and results, visit the JetBrains Blog.

Azul Platform Prime – Engineered for Speed, Scale and Stability

Azul Platform Prime is available for x86 and ARM64 processors running Linux and is rigorously tested for enterprise workloads and compliant with the Java SE version standards using the industry standard Java Compatibility Kit (the JCK or TCK) test suite. It is based on the same “HotSpot” JVM and JDK code base used by the OpenJDK project, with specific enhancements relating to JIT compilation, garbage collection and startup/warmup behavior.

Azul’s Falcon is an LLVM-based JIT compiler that delivers highly optimized application code at runtime. C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) is a proven, high-performance garbage collector that maintains concurrent, disruption-free application execution across wide ranges of heap sizes from GBs to multi-TBs, and allocation rates from MBs/sec to tens of GB/sec.

Together, these runtime features provide significantly improved application operating characteristics and carrying capacity, improving application throughout and response times while lowering the infrastructure and cloud costs required to run business-critical workloads.

“From its inception, Kotlin was designed with the goal of building robust applications, including server-side solutions where performance is critical. Performance has always been a priority for us because it’s essential to our users,” said Vsevolod Tolstopyatov, Kotlin project lead. “Kotlin incorporates specific language features, such as inline functions and inline classes, which directly enhance performance. We’ve developed the Kotlin Coroutines library to facilitate concurrency and asynchronous programming, enabling efficient, scalable applications. Recognizing that the JVM runtime is one of the most critical elements in application performance, we believe our collaboration with Azul will unlock new opportunities to further elevate the performance capabilities of Kotlin applications.”

“The Azul JVM is the fastest and cheapest way to run Kotlin applications. Azul Platform Prime is built to solve the performance challenges enterprise applications face at scale. By providing a runtime that significantly improves the execution of JVM-based applications, which includes Kotlin-based applications, organizations can deploy applications more rapidly, with less tuning and ensure scalability as demands grow,” said Gil Tene, co-founder and chief technology officer at Azul. “Through our strategic collaboration with JetBrains, we help Kotlin teams to significantly boost their DevOps productivity and runtime application efficiency, which enables them to achieve their business priorities while improving the bottom line.”

For Kotlin development teams that are looking to enhance the performance of their web or server-side applications, engineers can download Azul Platform Prime Stream Builds, which are free for evaluation and development, to profile the benefits of the Zing JDK with their Kotlin applications.

Additional Resources:

• Azul Platform Prime – High-Performance Java Platform Comparison Matrix
• Azul Platform Prime – Video Overview

About JetBrains

JetBrains creates intelligent software development tools used by over 11.4 million professionals and 88 Fortune Global Top 100 companies. Its lineup of more than 30 products includes award-winning IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, as well as the JetBrains AI-powered coding assistant, coding agent Junie and productivity-boosting team tools like YouTrack, Qodana, and TeamCity. JetBrains is also the creator of Kotlin, a cross-platform language used by more than 2.5 million developers worldwide yearly. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has offices around the world. For more information, please visit https://www.jetbrains.com/.

About Azul

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Azul provides the Java platform for the modern cloud enterprise. Azul is the only company 100% focused on Java. Millions of Java developers, hundreds of millions of devices and the world’s most highly regarded businesses trust Azul to power their applications with exceptional capabilities, performance, security, value, and success. Azul customers include 36% of the Fortune 100, 50% of Forbes top 10 World’s Most Valuable Brands, all 10 of the world’s top 10 financial trading companies. and leading brands like Avaya, Bazaarvoice, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, LG, Mastercard, Mizuho, Priceline, Salesforce, Software AG, and Workday. Learn more at azul.com  and follow us @azulsystems.

Original press release:

• https://www.azul.com/newsroom/azul-and-jetbrains-collaborate-to-enhance-runtime-performance-for-kotlin-workloads/
• https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/kotlin-and-azul-collaboration-for-enhanced-runtime-performance/

The post Azul and JetBrains Collaborate to Enhance Runtime Performance for Kotlin Workloads appeared first on foojay.

Sonatype have just released the 9th edition of their State of the Software Supply Chain Report. It delves into the landscape of open source, software development, and software supply chain security. I thought I’d pull out some highlights for Java Developers!

Software Supply Chains and Open Source

Maven Central hits 1 Trillion downloads

Open source adoption continues to grow, with Java (Maven) being a significant ecosystem.

The report indicates that Java projects and their versions have seen substantial growth. a 28% year-over-year increase in total projects available on Maven Central - hitting the amazing 1 Trillion download number.

Log4Shell is still with us

Unfortunately a good number of these downloads were for packages with known vulnerabilities. The percentage is reducing but over 10% of the downloads were questionable - why are we still downloading dependendencies with major vulnerabilities? More worrying is that there is evidence that the problem is much worse than it seems.

The infamous Log4J download numbers show that even after almost two years since the first occurrence of Log4Shell and with a massive 250 Million downloads - about ⅓ of them are for Log4J versions that contain the vulnerability. The conclusion is that we’re just not taking a active, structured approach to managing our dependencies.

90% of an application is open source but how much of it is maintained?

Up to 90% of production code is believed to originate from open source and not all of it is developed or maintained with the rigour we might expect. The OpenSSF have been running a programme to monitor and evaluate open source projects.

The report has some results from this programme and it’s disheartening to learn that only 11% of the 100,000 or so projects they monitor are actually considered to be ‘maintained’ Assuming that any open source project that you select is always going to do the right thing as far as security goes is pretty much a broken assumption. Luckily the OpenSSF and others are working hard to help you make better choices from the start. The report has some interesting info about that too

The developer is the first and often only line of defense

Overall our behavior is mostly unchanged from last year or the year before that. While software supply chain attacks are climbing, with open source projects (and known vulnerabilities) are a primary target, as an industry we’re still pretty poor at dealing with the issues

Which means that for most Java developers, choosing the right dependencies is both a key skill and a important responsibility. Often only effort that goes into evaluating a dependency in toto is done right at the start by the developer. Once in the supply chain that dependency is never given much attention - it’s just patched.

Also, as the report says: you could save up to 6 weeks of effort a year per application if you chose more wisely at the start.

Help is coming

It’s not all doom and gloom though - there are signs that we’re acknowledging the problem and beginning to change our behaviour. How we’re modernising the software supply chain is a strong theme across the report.

Chapter 2’s Open Source Security Practises explains more about what the OpenSSF and others have been doing to help us all in this area.

Software Supply Chain Maturity

While the efforts of the OpenSSF and other organizations are a welcome aid in helping with dependency management to some extent that ship has sailed.

Government assistance

Governments around the world are grappling with the challenges of secure software supply chains. The cost of cybercrime and the threat of it's big brother "cyber-warefare" means the sleeping giants have awoke and are intent on helping us help ourselves.

The report covers aspects of this intervention. It’s important reading as there are significant implications for all of us. The list of government activities related to software, software security and software supply chains continues to grow. For example,

In the US we have

• United States National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS)
• Securing Open Source Software Act of 2023
• AI for National Security Act:
• FDA Cybersecurity in Medical Devices
• SEC Regulation
• Cyber Strategy of the Department of Defense
• CISA Open Source Software Security Roadmap
• NHTSA Cybersecurity Best Practices for Modern Vehicles

While the EU

• Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)
• Product Liability Directive (PLD)
• Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2)

Take a look at chapter 5 of the report as governments around the world grapple with the sober fact that the compromise of software supply chains through software dependencies is the foremost emerging threat.

Bath and the Open Source Baby

All these legislation efforts demonstrate the seriousness of the cyber crime siutation and the desire in government(s) to 'fix' the problem. There is ready acknowledgement that solutions must not have serious impact on the open source communities that fuel the innovation we all benefit from.

However, views and approaches differ and there is definite risk that in an attempt to resolve the problems quickly the cure will be too draconion and end up decimating the community it's trying to protect.

A note on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)

Once such concern is the CRA. A laudible EU effort to formalise responsibilities and ownership through out the software supply chain but which has many groups and foundations concerned because of its approach. Some consider that the CRA could implode the open source world.
Read more here:

1. Apache Software Foundation
2. Eclipse Foundation
3. Linux Foundation

Generative AI is here

The recent explosion of generative AI on the scene can’t be ignored and obviously it is having an impact on software development across the board.

This year the report has a specific chapter dedicated to AI in Software Development. Key highlights?

And already in production

The most astonishing news is how fast tools like ChatGPT have found a home in development organisations. 97% of 800 developers said that they used generative AI in their workflows.

Maybe even more amazing is that it is not a sly, skunkworks style integration. This is fully above board and executive permission and management.

AI is not going to replace you - but a developer using AI just might ...

Although we might consider that we’re still climbing the hype curve it seems that there is solid value for developers when using AI as a tool in development.

If you’re concerned about AI taking over your job your not alone - 18% of those surveyed had the same worry. However, it seems that using these tools as part of your role makes you more productive and more valuable.

Summary

Sonatype's state of the software supply chain is a yearly eye-opener for the industry. It clear that this year, more than ever before, our world is starting to change.

While the adoption of AI is going to be high on all our agendas the real impact will come from government legislation

I’ll sign off with a great quote form the report for those of you who think positively about AI:

“The hottest new programming language is English.”

The post State of the Software Supply Chain Report: Key Takeaways for Java Developers appeared first on foojay.

Since the start of the Friends of OpenJDK community in April 2020, we've had half yearly status reports, providing the highlights of the past half year, together with some stats and analysis, ending with roadmaps for the next upcoming periods.

Note: Here are the earlier reports, from January - June 2021, July - December 2021, and January - June 2022. At that stage, a much stricter cookie policy was implemented, for reasons of the EU's GDPR and similar, so that the Google Analytics trends which had been very nice until that stage (we had as much traffic in the first half of 2022 as we had for the whole of 2021) were destroyed. Attempts were made to recover or reinstate similar methods for analyzing usage, hence the delay in reports coming out since midway through last year, though these attempts have failed. And if the method for counting usage changes as dramatically as it now has, then it becomes impossible to discuss trend comparisons from before that change and after it. In terms of trends, we now need to start from scratch. Since that is not something that can be repaired, making comparisons between different periods in the past and the current period, as in previous reports, doesn't make sense anymore.

What's good about all this is that we can now look at more meaningful measures of the impact of the Friends of OpenJDK community such as...

...FOSDEM 2023

Over the past 6 months, the activity that most clearly highlights all the key strengths and relevance of the Friends of OpenJDK community was FOSDEM 2023.

After having collaborated with and supported FOSDEM during the two virtual years of the Corona period, we came together for the first time in person this year, bringing together developers from across the Java community, and beyond, and had an awesome and truly united experience, as described in detail here, with a speaker dinner and full rooms and well known as well as less well known engaging speakers.

We fully intend to continue the tradition next year. Maybe we could try to use both FOSDEM days, since we have so much content, and 20 minute sessions are entertaining and fun, though occasionally also a bit stressful.

Advisory Board Growth

Next, a key aspect to highlight right away is that the Foojay.io Advisory Board has grown over the past 6 months, with 5 new organizations being added, and now there are 17 in total. Here they are, together with a great quotation from each organization, really showing how well aligned we all are in relation to the Friends of OpenJDK community.

Chronicle Software: "Foojay is an open and independent marketplace of ideas and curated information relating to the JVM, and as such is immensely useful for the entire community. We are very happy to support Foojay however we can and are delighted to be part of the Foojay Board." — Jerry Shea, Chronicle Software MD, APAC

Gradle: "From the outset, open source has been central to Gradle, starting with the build tool and now encompassing a program through which we contribute our commercial Gradle developer acceleration tools to open source endeavors and institutions. It's wonderful to observe Foojay's emergence as a leading provider of impartial, curated content and insights on all aspects of open source Java. The ecosystem truly needs this, and it will undoubtedly reap substantial benefits from it." — Vincent Mayers, Director of Community Operations, Gradle

OmniFish: "At OmniFish, we want to be part of the Java and Jakarta EE communities by giving back and being active participants. We like to share our knowledge and expertise, and work with other developers and industry leaders to create new ideas and improve the Java ecosystem. By joining the Foojay.io Advisory Board, we hope to connect with like-minded individuals, share our ideas, and work together to improve the Java ecosystem. We look forward to contributing to the ongoing development and growth of the Java and Jakarta EE communities which is already happening at Foojay.io." — Ondro Mihalyi, OmniFish Founder

Sonatype: "Since its inception, Sonatype has been passionate about open source, with particularly deep roots in the Java community. It’s an honour to be part of the Foojay Board. We hope to continue to help the community grow and adapt to all the challenges the future brings." — Steve Poole, Director of Developer Advocacy, Sonatype

Yugabyte: "Developers increasingly rely on PostgreSQL and YugabyteDB for powering their backend applications, Cloud native services, and ultimately, advancing their careers. We view Foojay as an exceptional platform where developers can enhance their understanding of databases to create more robust and high-performance applications." — Denis Magda, Head of Developer Relations at Yugabyte

For the full quotes for each of the above, see https://foojay.io/board.

How does an organization become a Foojay.io Advisory Board member? The mechanism is similar to the "doacracy" of the Apache Software Foundation. If one or more people from an organization are actively collaborating in one way or another in the context of Foojay.io, e.g., publishing content on Foojay Today, sharing or integrating their content into the site, or showing enthusiasm and involvement in some other way, they're approach to see whether their organization as a whole wants to align with Foojay.

That means that there's an organization-level commitment to the community goals underpinning Foojay, such as is clear from the quotes above, together with a regular cadence of content finding its way from that organization to Foojay. No money is involved at all, no "pay for play", simply an alignment of intentions with those of Foojay, with the logo of the organization being published together with an affirming quotation, sealing the already existing relationship that one or more individuals in the organization have with the intentions of the Foojay community.

Foojay Today

Probably the most successful aspect of the Foojay site, at least in terms of broad usage, are the daily articles. Every day, Monday to Friday, of the week one or more articles are published by the community on Foojay Today.

Since Foojay Today is the one part of Foojay that changes on a daily basis, with continual new content coming in, which is discussed and worked on collaboratively via the Foojay Slack channels, including a publicly discussed weekly schedule, it is also the part that drives the majority of the unique views, shown in the stats section below.

Calendar

A lot of work has been done by the Yelk team in Ukraine in collaboration with the Foojay.io community. Of course, Foojay.io is a WordPress site. In a way, that's sad, that we're not (yet?) using an OpenJDK technology for the Friends of OpenJDK site. On the other hand, everyone knows (loves?) WordPress, so onboarding new collaborators is trivial.

We're constantly finetuning and adding enhancements and new features to Foojay.io, ever since we began the project from scratch in April 2020. One of the most impressive recent features is the Foojay.io Community Calendar.

The intention is for this calendar to list ALL conferences and JUG events or relevance to anyone using the OpenJDK in any way. To that end, an API is available, and integration has already been done with the Adoptium calendar and the JUG Switzerland calendar, while manually adding new events to the moderation queue is a simple process (requiring no login credentials) of clicking on a calendar cell and then submitting the details in a simple form.

A lot more work will be done on the calendar to make it even more useful, e.g., the ability to select periods and geographies, etc, will be added, as well as... we should definitely explore integrating with the Meetup API, so that any events on a JUG's meetup page will automatically be entered into the Foojay.io calendar's moderation queue.

Java User Groups

Related to the above, clearly the purpose of the community project that is Foojay.io is not the millions of Java developers out there, since the millions of Java developers are mostly simply daily worker bees rather than actively involved in the Java community as such. That is easy to see when you go to a JUG meeting. Despite JUGs being held in major cities all over the world, you'll never find more than around, at most 80 (which is really quite a lot) actually attending JUG meetings.

That being the case, the purpose of a community site such as Foojay.io is to bring together and seek to educate the "pathfinders" within/into locations, e.g., companies, where developers are found. For that purpose, to support where the pathfinders come together, i.e., JUGs, the Foojay Calendar exists, as well as the page (currently manually maintained and therefore incomplete/quickly out of date) the JUG List.

One can also imagine there being a listing of speakers, i.e., some kind of dating site for speakers/JUGs and conferences, and that is in the works too. And/or a way to appeal for sponsorships, too, as well as multiple channels on the Foojay Slack for JUGs to interact with each other, which is already the case and JUGs are very welcome to use the Foojay Slack for that purpose. A special highlight in this area is that new life has been blown into Philippines JUG via Foojay.io, with meetings having been had again several times now.

Are you involved in a JUG in any way and are there any resources that you need and that the Foojay community can help you with? Just speak up, that's a key reason for the Friends of OpenJDK to exist in the first place.

Foojay.io Disco API

Also related to Foojay.io is the "Universal OpenJDK Discovery API" (Disco API) for discovering JDK distributions and integrating them into any tools and technologies where that makes sense. Those that use it love it because it takes away a lot of their problems in finding and updating JDK distributions. Although there's no direct dependencies between Foojay.io and Disco, they're indirectly related other as community projects that fill a gap in the Java ecosystem and both are initiated and driven by/from Azul.

The Disco API is now integrated in or used by the following:

• sdkman (get download links to all OpenJDK and GraalVM distributions via Disco)
• gradle toolchain plugin (use Disco to enable users to change the JDK for their builds, defaults to Temurin, around ~10000 downloads per day)
• jbang (use Disco to enable users to use a JDK of their choice when using jbang, defaults to Temurin, around 400 downloads per day)
• jreleaser (use Disco to enable users to use a JDK of their choice when using jreleaser, defaults to Zulu, around 300 downloads per day)
• paketo build packs (use Disco to get the links to all JDK distributions)
• Hydraulic Parts
• JDKMon (a tool to check for updates of OpenJDK distributions)
• NetBeans (use it to download and install OpenJDK distributions from within the IDE, into which it is built, around 200 downloads per day)
• Downloads via browsers (around 800 downloads per day)
• Plugins for Browsers and IDE's (e.g., IntelliJ IDEA)

A separate article on interesting analysis relating to the Disco API will be published separately.

Podcast

A really cool addition to the Foojay.io "franchise" is the Foojay.io Podcast, with its cool jingle (thanks Erik Costlow), great host (first Erik, then Frank Delporte, and now sometimes others too, i.e., really sharing the fun/load).

Frank went on a virtual JUG tour, several JUGs have been covered, great conversations with cool people from all over the world, plus many interesting themed podcasts, really great, and more coming from September onwards.

Check it out:

https://foojay.io/today/category/podcast/

Certification Program

Something rather wonderful has been happening on the Foojay.io Slack over the last few months. Initiated by well known Dutch Java luminaries Roy Wasse and Bert Jan Schrijver, and others from OpenValue, a Java certification is being worked out that actually measures programming skills (rather than the ability to complete multiple choice questions, etc).

This will be the Java community validating Java skills and anyone certified via the Foojay.io Java Certification program will have community stamp of approval with prospective employers having a stronger guarantee that their new hires know what they're claiming to know. During this week, a session will be held at the OpenValue meetup on this topic, as outlined below.

Join in with the above at the OpenValue meetup here and, of course, join the Foojay Slack, where there's a channel dedicated to the above discussion, a cadence of meetings, experimentation, demos, etc, i.e., a vibrant project that's great to be able to host and encourage via Foojay.

OpenJDK Information

The first impulse for the creation of Foojay.io back in April 2020 was the absence of a clear place listing all the issues making it into a quarterly update or LTS release. That content continues to be added to the site each quarter, as shown below, with the option for anyone to vote on their favorite fixes for addition to the Highlights tab.

A key collaborator with Foojay.io is Chris Newland, whose range of tools on chriswhocodes.com are gradually being transitioned to Foojay.io, most recently his collection of command line arguments reference materials, though the display and user interface continue to be enhanced and expanded.

A core aspect of Foojay.io is these kinds of reference materials, though they may be of relevance to a smaller subset of Java developers than initially thought. I.e., this is not daily changing content and therefore may attract less views, while the fact that this reference material is out there is something that could be better known. Still, bottom line, this content may be more relevant for specialists rather than the daily worker bee putting applications together as specified by architects and other team leaders who are of a smaller number and may be the ones who find this kind of content of greater relevance to them.

Everybody Wants Stats

Below you can see that the trend breaks midway through last year, referred to in the note in small script above, purely because of the change in cookie policies, which means that any discussion of the number of unique views across the Foojay.io site is now meaningless. Also the total unique visitors and sessions has been impacted by this.

The Y axis shows a line for each day from May 1, 2020 (the first month of Foojay's existence) to today. The X axis shows the number of unique views on each day. There are very big spikes, which have been discussed in previous Foojay status reports, referred to above.

The day on which the largest spike took place overall above correlates with the most popular article yet published on Foojay, which is Helen Scott's multiple carets article below.

Notice that you can now see the total number of unique views, which several people have asked for. It helps to see which articles clearly resonate with a broad audience versus those that are more relevant to a more niche group of specialists. (In the above case, the article was republished in November 2021, while it was originally published in September 2021, which is why the unique views count starts in September while its publication date shows November. Maybe that distinction should also be shown, i.e., first published versus subsequent republications.)

Each article now publicly exposes its unique views live on the page, although within WordPress itself this information has always been visible, i.e., these are the most popular articles that have been published on Foojay.io.

In addition to all the articles on Foojay Today, all/many/most of the other pages on Foojay are now for the first time also being tracked for unique views, so as to gather stats on them, too. For example, you'll see the below on the Foojay Download page.

It helps to take two equivalent periods and compare them to each other, before the cookie policy change, e.g., May 1 to July 13 in 2022 with the same period in the previous year, which shows an almost 100% growth of unique users year over year, as shown below, together with other stats from those specific periods.

Other stats that may be of interest are that Foojay.io now has over 10K followers on Twitter (though that number goes up and down quite wildly and erratically), 1101 subscribers on Foojay.io Slack, and the number of Foojay.io Today authors is publicly listed here.

Skin in the Game

A recurring question in the context of Foojay.io relates to who has "skin in the game" here. As indicated in the Foojay.io Advisory Board Growth section above, there's no "pay for play" here, the downside of which is the loosely coupled commitment of the organizations involved in the Foojay community. I.e., the "skin in the game" is of a collaborative nature, i.e., content is introduced from the organization to the Foojay.io, which is fantastic and shows the level of support the organization has for Foojay.

However, maybe more options than that could be available. One that has recently been developed and is available to organizations is something akin to part of Foojay now being available for ads and sponsorship. There is a new section in the Foojay WordPress specifically for adding adverts to Foojay, as shown below, together with the number of times the ad is displayed, great for analysis and post mortems after a campaign has ended.

And when creating the ad, as shown below, the Probability field is available which sets the likelihood/frequency that the ad will be shown.

The ads appear high up on the page, at or around "above the fold", i.e., no scrolling is needed to see at least the top of the advert, the above settings producing the advert shown below.

There is no annoying scrolling or flashing between one ad and the next. Instead, whenever you land on the main page (refresh it a few times to see the two currently available) you see the advert based on the probability setting. When you come back the next time, the probability that the ad you've already seen will be shown again is lower than before, and most likely you'll see a different ad, based on its probability. Once a few more have been added, we'll also make explicit that these are actually ads, i.e., some kind of "Sponsored Content" label, will be added to the above banner.

In this way, there's now a placeholder for sponsorships or, at least, the ad space you see above could be one part of a sponsorship package, with higher probabilities being available to those with a higher sponsorship, coupled with other similar benefits. The exact categories and sponsorship packages are yet to be determined and will be put together in the collaborative way with which those involved in the Foojay community will be familiar.

By making this opportunity available, organizations can be offered, also whether they are part of the Foojay.io board or not, to have "skin in the game", i.e., to invest in larger or smaller amounts to contribute to the continued growth and maintenance of the Foojay.io community.

Upcoming Features and Enhancements

In terms of roadmap, I see the following happening in the coming months.

• Prioritization of more content from Chris Newland into Foojay.io.
• Continued and stronger focus around FinOps.
• Certification program firming up and moving out of the experimentation stage.
• Even more collaborative podcasts from September onwards.
• Foojay.io Calendar enhancements
• Meetup API integration into the Foojay.io Calendar.
• Sponsorship banner usage and, in general, more "skin in the game" for participating organizations.
• Newsletter, maybe via LinkedIn, as an avenue to get content from Foojay.io to new groups of users/collaborators.
• Exploration of transitioning Foojay.io from closed source GitLab to open source GitHub.

The post Foojay Status Report: July 2023 appeared first on foojay.

Today, OptaPlanner is entering a new chapter.

The project I created and worked on for seventeen years has matured under Red Hat's wings for the past ten years. Last year, when Red Hat's strategy changed, it became apparent that the project needed a new, sustainable future. Therefore, we founded a company around it. A company that lives and breathes planning optimization, to further nurture the Open Source project to its fullest potential, under a new name. Timefold is the continuation of OptaPlanner.

Timefold Community Edition is an Apache-licensed Open Source solver for operational planning optimization. It's a fork of OptaPlanner, and it is already faster, lighter and better documented than OptaPlanner. And that’s just the beginning! Upgrade from OptaPlanner to Timefold today.

The Timefold project is supported by Timefold BV, a professional Open Source company founded by Maarten Vandenbroucke (CEO) and Geoffrey De Smet (the OptaPlanner creator, CTO), with funding from Smartfin, an Open Source minded VC that fully supports our vision. We sell an Enterprise subscription with professional support and high-scalability features, to pay for the continued development of the free Open Source project.

Our mission is to free the world from wasteful scheduling. Our vision is to make Planning Optimization easy to use and simple to build.

Timefold is committed to being the world’s most powerful, versatile, and easy-to-use planning optimization solver. We combine our advanced AI solver algorithms with constraint models written in Java, Python or Kotlin to be our main differentiator from other solvers. We remain Open Source which ensures a no-barrier entry for every team that wants to start using Timefold. We are hiring the brightest and most creative engineers to explore how we can make planning optimization even more accessible!

For more information, read the Frequently Asked Questions about the fork.

The post Timefold Forks OptaPlanner: Open Source Solver in Java appeared first on foojay.

OmniFish are proud to announce that they have established themselves as a new international company in the field of Jakarta EE support, specifically supporting the application server Eclipse GlassFish, a new cloud‑native Jakarta EE runtime Piranha Cloud, and their associated components such as Mojarra, the Jakarta Faces implementation.

OmniFish, based in Estonia, EU, welcomes the new Jakarta EE 10 version. They are going to support Jakarta EE 10 applications on Eclipse GlassFish 7, which will be released later in October 2022. Moreover, OmniFish have recently joined the Jakarta EE Working Group and they are strongly committed to contributing to the Jakarta EE standards. Some of the OmniFish founders are well-known Jakarta EE experts, which provides strong guarantees that OmniFish will become one of the key players in evolving and modernizing the Jakarta EE platform.

OmniFish provide support for the Eclipse GlassFish server and the Piranha Cloud runtime, invest a lot in their development

Eclipse GlassFish, with OmniFish providing enterprise support, again becomes a reliable open source Jakarta EE application server backed by a commercial company, which invests heavily into its development. Previously owned and supported by Oracle, and before that by Sun Microsystems, GlassFish has been contributed to the Eclipse Foundation. Since then, OmniFish have significantly contributed to the advancement of Eclipse GlassFish, with well over 1600 code changes (commits), which is more than 60% of all the changes since the contribution.

OmniFish is now leading the development of the final version of Eclipse GlassFish 7, which is planned to be released later in October 2022. For this upcoming release, OmniFish engineers have dramatically increased test coverage, fixed a large number of defects, realized architectural and performance improvements, and added full Jakarta EE 10 and JDK 17 support. Piranha Cloud is a new runtime re-imagining the usage of Jakarta EE APIs in very small, embedded, and highly modular runtimes. This approach is a radical departure from the application server model.

Piranha Cloud is developed from scratch but shares many implementation components with Eclipse GlassFish, such as Soteria, Mojarra, Jersey, and many more.

Quotes from the OmniFish founders:

Ondro Mihályi, OmniFish director and co-founder:

We at OmniFish are here to support customers that build and maintain systems based on Eclipse GlassFish, need to modernize their Jakarta EE solutions, improve performance or save costs. With Piranha Cloud, we also provide a safe and supported journey from Eclipse GlassFish to cloud-native deployments with a modern and efficient runtime.

Arjan Tijms, OmniFish director and co-founder:

OmniFish will show its dedication to Jakarta EE by continuing to support Eclipse GlassFish, and additionally bringing Jakarta EE 10 compatibility to Piranha Cloud, which enables a wider range of users to take advantage of the Jakarta EE APIs.

David Matějček, OmniFish director and co-founder:

Some time ago I contacted Arjan and we started discussing the state of Jakarta EE, Eclipse GlassFish, and other projects. When Ondro joined us later, we decided to start our own company which would boost Eclipse GlassFish and Jakarta EE development to make it modern, useful, and supported for production systems.

OmniFish aims at the application servers market and fast-growing cloud and serverless markets

OmniFish are the biggest contributor to the Jakarta EE 10 compatible Eclipse GlassFish 7 and a major contributor to the Jakarta EE 10 specifications. They are in a prime position to provide the best professional support for Eclipse GlassFish possible. It is estimated that the application servers market size will double by 2028, reaching USD 40.96 billion. According to the OmniFaces survey, GlassFish is the 3rd most frequently used server, with a 22% share. Even though Eclipse GlassFish is open source and free to use, there’s a lot of potential for OmniFish to grow by providing support and services around it.

OmniFish also heavily contributes to the Piranha Cloud runtime, which aims to provide Jakarta EE functionality to build native cloud and serverless applications. As Piranha Cloud builds on the same components as Eclipse GlassFish, it provides a natural transition for Jakarta EE applications to cloud and serverless deployments. It is estimated that the cloud services market size will triple by 2030, reaching USD 1620 billion. OmniFish expects that this growth will result in increased interest in cloud-native runtimes like Piranha Cloud and will open opportunities for other OmniFish services and products based on it.

Ondro Mihályi, OmniFish director and co-founder:

We at OmniFish have put a lot of effort to turn the upcoming Eclipse GlassFish 7 into a modern and reliable application server so that our clients can use it and sleep peacefully. Meanwhile, we're working on Piranha Cloud as a new generation cloud runtime, based on our experience with GlassFish and other Jakarta EE servers. We are 100% dedicated to making our partners and clients successful with Eclipse GlassFish and Piranha Cloud. We aim to provide a cost-efficient and reliable path to modernizing their Jakarta EE applications, should our clients choose on-premise deployments or uplift their applications to cloud.

Who is behind the OmniFish company?

OmniFish, formal name Omnifish OÜ, was formally established as a company in 2022 by Ondro Mihályi, Arjan Tijms, and David Matějček, with headquarters in Estonia, EU. During the same year, it joined the Eclipse Foundation and the Jakarta EE Working Group as a Participant member. With employees located in several countries in the EU and partners across the world, OmniFish is an international company aiming at the global market.

Arjan Tijms is a Java Champion, was Jakarta Faces co-spec lead under the JCP and Mojarra committer, and a Jakarta Faces and Jakarta Security EG member under the JCP, and current project lead of Jakarta Security, Jakarta Authentication, Jakarta Authorization, Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta Faces, and committer of Eclipse Mojarra, Eclipse Soteria and author of the award-winning OmniFaces library. He has published three books with Apress on the topic of Jakarta EE and has written many articles about Jakarta EE.

Ondro Mihályi is a project member of Jakarta Batch, Jakarta Messaging, and Jakarta Config specifications. He was also a core member of the Microprofile team. He’s an experienced Jakarta EE lecturer, a frequent conference speaker, a Java Champion, and the leader of the Czech Java User Group. He co-authored the Java EE 8 Microservices book published by Packt.

David Matějček is an expert in the Eclipse GlassFish server, he’s worked with it and its predecessors and alternatives for more than 15 years. David is a senior software architect and expert in quality assurance, testing, automation, troubleshooting, and fixing defects, he is also a member of the Jakarta Persistence and the Jakarta Faces teams, and contributes to open source projects for many years.

OmniFish can be reached via their contact page, or on Twitter at @OmniFishEE. More information about the company can be found at https://omnifish.ee.

For more information:

• Original press release published on the OmniFish web site
• Jakarta EE Working Group Releases Jakarta EE 10
• OmniFish joined the Jakarta EE Working Group
• Learn more about Jakarta EE 10

The post OmniFish Announces Enterprise Support for Eclipse GlassFish, Jakarta EE 10, and a New Cloud‑Native Jakarta EE Runtime appeared first on foojay.

Payara is one of the few vendors to have a product certified against the Jakarta EE 10 Platform on the launch day. Payara 6 Enterprise will follow in Q1, 2023, bringing the future of Jakarta EE to those using Payara’s enterprise product.

“With the release of Jakarta EE 10, Jakarta EE - formerly Java EE - continues to lead the way in application development for enterprise, cloud native Java applications. Payara Server is proud to support reliable and secure deployments of Jakarta EE apps in any environment. Being a member of the Eclipse Foundation, and a Strategic Member of the Jakarta EE Working Group, Payara continuously contributes to the Jakarta EE initiative and is pleased to welcome this next stage", emphasized Payara CEO and Founder Steve Millidge.

Jakarta EE 10 is the first major release of Jakarta EEsince the major namespace update, brought by Jakarta EE 9. With Jakarta EE 9, the package namespace javax moved to jakarta across the Jakarta EE 9 Platform, Web Profile specifications, and related TCKs. With Jakarta EE 10, we see the first release in the new namespace that also adds functionality for the Jakarta EE user. 

The baseline Java JDK used is also changing, from Java 8 to Java 11 at API level, and Java 17 for runtimes. For Jakarta EE 8 users moving to Jakarta EE 10, all Jakarta EE imports in the code will need to be changed to the new namespace. For example, for messaging, javax.jms must become jakarta.jms; Java Persistence, heavily used in Hibernate and Spring, must move from javax.persistence to jakarta.persistence, etc.

There are several things that every developer can look forward to with Jakarta EE 10. New Java SE Features can now be used with Jakarta EE 10; some of these are Completable Future, Fork/Join pools, and better integration with new technologies like OpenID. Payara Community users will be able to make use of these changes straightaway, thanks to Payara 6 Community Alpha 4.

Many deprecated features have been also removed for Jakarta EE 10, streamlining, and improving the developer experience. A lot of work has been done across APIs to provide deployable resources, attached to the application through annotations. The aim of this is that developers will not have to use a deployment descriptor or similar in future when deploying resources that their applications need. 

There are also many exciting improvements to Jakarta EE specifications. For example, Jakarta Faces now has a completely programmable implementation and Jakarta REST has a new Bootstrap API, so developers no longer must use it in a container. There are also major improvements to CDI, support for polymorphic types in JSON-B, and much more.

By supporting Jakarta EE 10 as soon as possible, Payara Server continues to be easy to learn, simple to use, and the first choice for Jakarta EE 10 applications.

For more information about Payara, please contact: marketing@payara.fish

About Payara:

A global open source company, Payara creates innovative infrastructure software.  We proudly nurture and grow an open, collaborative community to advance our software and services by being innovative and flexible while providing first-class support, stability, and security. We actively contribute to Jakarta EE  as one of the main Eclipse Foundation Solutions members and members of the Project Management Committee to shape the future of the industry. Payara is one of 205 organizations nationally recognized with the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade 2021.

For more information, please visit:

Payara Welcomes Jakarta EE 10

Jakarta EE 10 Certification

The post Payara Launches Jakarta EE 10 Platform Compatible Product appeared first on foojay.

"Prior to the creation of Foojay,  the ecosystem of OpenJDK users lacked a vendor-neutral community platform for many years. It is wonderful to see more and more individuals and organizations, such as Contrast Security, getting involved since the foundation's inception in April 2020. Contrast Security not only shares their insights about the OpenJDK, but also provides valuable security tips and tricks as well as helps collaborate around Foojay, the place for friends of OpenJDK," said Geertjan Wielenga, Senior Director of Open Source Projects at Azul, the initiator of Foojay.

Contrast Security along with the other Foojay Advisory Board Members will help guide the direction, content and oversight of Foojay.io, the community site for developers who use, target, and run their applications on top of Java and OpenJDK, with a focus on growing the community and meeting its mission to provide free information for everyday Java developers.

"We're honored to join the Foojay Advisory Board because we know Java developers rely on the Foojay community and the foundation's mission of sharing information and improving the entire market as a whole," said Steve Wilson, Chief Product Officer at Contrast Security. "Contrast is proud to help progress security within Java applications and assist developers to build securely without having to change the way they work."

Contrast Secure Code Platform is the only platform on the market that embeds intelligent agents directly into the code to enable developers to detect vulnerabilities during and post-production. In addition to Java support, Contrast Secure Code Platform supports .NET, Ruby, Python, Node, PHP and Go. To learn more about Contrast's Java support as well as support for additional languages, please visit https://www.contrastsecurity.com/security-agent.

About Foojay:

Foojay, a place for Friends of OpenJDK, is a fast-growing community focused around the OpenJDK, providing tips and insights for Java developers, and user-focused Java and OpenJDK technical dashboards with free information on all things Java. A dedicated blogging area is available on Foojay to anyone who has thoughts or code to share on topics relevant to the Java ecosystem. To contribute, send a mail to hello@foojay.io. Follow us on Twitter @foojayio.

About Contrast Security:

Contrast Security secures the code that global business relies on. It is the industry's most modern and comprehensive Code Security Platform, removing security roadblock inefficiencies and empowering enterprise developers to write and release secure application code faster. Embedding code analysis and attack prevention directly into software with instrumentation, the Contrast platform automatically detects vulnerabilities while developers write code, eliminates false positives, and provides context-specific how-to-fix guidance for easy and fast vulnerability remediation. Doing so enables application and development teams to collaborate more effectively and to innovate faster while accelerating digital transformation initiatives. This is why a growing number of the world's largest private and public sector organizations rely on Contrast to secure their applications in development and extend protection to cloud and on-premise applications in production.

Media Contact:
Laura Asendio
Public Relations Manager
Contrast Security
pr@contrastsecurity.com

The post “Contrast Security Joins Foojay Advisory Board to Accelerate Java Developer Community Growth, Raise Security Perspective” — PR News appeared first on foojay.

The 1/2 year mark of 2021 is a good moment to reflect on the current status of Foojay.io (a central resource for the Java community’s daily ​information needs, a place for friends of OpenJDK, ​and a community platform for the Java ecosystem​ — bringing together and helping Java professionals everywhere), and to look at where we are and where to go next!

First, some data! Here's the Google Analytics graph showing total unique visitors to Foojay.io over the past half year, with several interesting spikes, explained in detail below.

Understanding the Data

It should be noted that Foojay.io was launched in April 2020, gradually building out from initially only providing OpenJDK release notes in the form of the OpenJDK update and release details, then to incorporating Marc Hoffmann's Java Almanac and the integration of Chris Newland's JVM Options Explorer, after which Foojay.io Today was added, as well as the several other features, such as the Java Events Calendar and the Foojay Pedia of frequently used/confused OpenJDK terminology.

Only from February onwards has real promotion of Foojay.io begun, since that's when the Foojay Board was launched (now consisting of Azul, Datadog, DataStax, Hazelcast, JFrog, Payara, and Snyk), so that in February Foojay.io became an authentically community-driven project enabling it to be promoted for the first time, shortly followed by the first community event, which was the two-day Foojay conference consisting of the Foojay Dev Room at FOSDEM 2021 (which explains the first big spike above in February), followed shortly thereafter by the Foojay Virtual JUG Tour in March and April (many thank yous go to Ari Waller from JFrog for the incredible work on networking and on logistics and to Jadon Ortlepp and his team from Payara for organizing the awesome social media cards), combined with the Virtual Field Trip at the University of Pforzheim. These 20+ events, done over the space of two months, across the world, sometimes multiple events per week, explain the up and down movement above in March and April.

Here's a map of the 20+ JUG visits across March and April, all done virtually, of course, with a large cross-section of the Java community and its technologies involved:

After that there were a number of significant spikes, in the graph above, which can also be explained: the big spike towards the end of April is because of Wim Deblauwe's brilliant and very well received "Better Error Handling for Your Spring Boot REST APIs", while the massive spike in May is because of Deepu Sasidharan's fantastically explained and comprehensive "Demystifying JVM Memory Management", these two articles were extremely well received, really popular on Reddit, for example, as well as elsewhere, drawing a lot of traffic to Foojay.io, not to mention the hot discussions around JEP 411 and the deprecation of the SecurityManager, with Peter Firmstone providing great content around this theme, such as "The Principle of Least Privilege and How JEP 411 Will Have a Negative Impact on Java Security".

It is also noticeable that a lot of JavaFX-related content is finding its way onto Foojay.io, indicating that there really is a lot of innovation going on in that part of the Java ecosystem, a combination of the possibilities provided by game development via FXGL by the amazing Almas Baimagambetov to the multiplatform JavaFX support provided by Gluon, to the enthusiasm around that combination together with Raspberry Pi by the inspiring Frank Delporte, while beyond the areas of JavaFX, the Java security domain has been excellently and thoroughly covered by Brian Vermeer from Snyk, microservices and beyond by Jadon Ortlepp from Payara, IntelliJ IDEA by Helen Scott from JetBrains, VS Code by Yaojin Yang from Microsoft, and simply cool and cutting edge performance-related content by Nicolas Frankel from Hazelcast. Well done to one and all. Thank you, Wim! Thank you, Deepu! Thank you, Peter! Thank you, Brian! Thank you, Frank! Thank you, Almas! Thank you, Nicolas! Thank you, Helen! Thank you, Yaojin! Thank you, Jadon! And well done, every single other individual contributor (just too many to name individually) for providing such strong content, day after day, week after week, month after month!

Month-By-Month Growth

Let's also look at the month-by-month growth of Foojay.io. The first graph shows that between January and March this year, i.e., over the space of two months, total unique visitors doubled:

That doubling effect, which took two months, i.e., from January to March, took half as long to achieve again just one month later, i.e., from April to May:

Thank You, Everyone!

In short, the trends are what one would hope... and they indicate that we're doing well as a community, that there is significant momentum, and that there's a lot to be gained in collaborating with Foojay.io, by publishing or republishing content here. Foojay.io is living up to its ambition to be a central resource for the Java community’s daily ​information needs, a place for friends of OpenJDK, ​and a community platform for the Java ecosystem​ — bringing together and helping Java professionals everywhere.​

Thank you to everyone involved, the dozens of contributors from across the Java ecosystem, the many organizations involved, in one way or another, including Payara, Snyk, Hazelcast, JFrog Jelastic, JetBrains, Datadog, DataStax, and beyond, the community managers, the enthusiastic participation of so many individuals (REALLY too many to mention, you know who you are) in discussions on the Slack channel and Twitter, the many JUGs who welcomed Foojay.io throughout March and April so very warmly and enthusiastically, Professor Thomas Schuster and the University of Pforzheim for the virtual field trip (one of many of such future trips), and the great Java technology press reception such as by John K. Waters from ADT Magazine!

Many thanks also to specific people at Azul, you know who you are, including, among many others, Pavel Petroshenko, Betsy Rhodes, Gerrit Grunwald, and Carl Dea, as well as (maybe more than anyone for being so flexible and adaptable and open to all our smallest whims) the development team of Slava, Vigen, and everyone at Yelk.

Quotes

"Foojay is an example of the strength of the Java community that is greater than any single company and is composed of active, passionate, and caring individuals who want to share their expertise and help mentor the next generation of developers." — Stephen Chin, Head of Developer Relations at JFrog (on Foojay Board page)

"It’s incredibly important for every ecosystem to have a core location for information to help grow the community and be an educational resource for all developers to use. Java has lacked this core space for many years." — Simon Maple Field CTO at Snyk (on Foojay Board page)

"I like the way Foojay highlights what the Java community is doing. We have missed that." — Johan Vos, Co Founder at Gluon (on Twitter)

Next Steps

The Foojay.io site is under heavy development right now, a new homepage will be released over the next weeks. After that, there are several directions we can go in together—how about a forum, a job board, a newsletter, a real calendar, a code exchange, and Foojay Awards?

How about another virtual JUG tour, this time focused on Java 17, which is just around the corner? How about a tour to universities and colleges, just like we did with the University of Pforzheim? How about using Foojay as a platform to bring in content by students from universities and colleges and to introduce them to the Java community, e.g., see Open Source Tools as an Opportunity for SMEs to Use AI, recently published by Nguyen Pham from Pforzheim. How about regional Foojay tours, especially now that not everything will need to be virtual anymore? How about a campaign specifically to promote the OpenJDK, since that's a logical thing for friends of OpenJDK to do? And... how about some swag?

All this and more is in the pipeline and will be reported on 6 months from now in the next reflection on Foojay.io, a place for friends of OpenJDK!

The post Foojay Status Report: January – June 2021 appeared first on foojay.