Java is an old acquaintance in the software development market. Ten years ago, Java was a popular programming language, and every second application was running on it. But what about now? That hasn't changed; many new programming languages have emerged since Java introduces, but it remains at the forefront of software development and ranked in the top 5 most popular programming languages by leading technology websites.

Java is a robust programming language and is used to develop sophisticated software for various devices and embedded systems. It supports multiple platforms and has a rich and comprehensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Also, integrated development environments (IDEs) are development platforms that provide a complete set of automation tools, editors, and debuggers. This section provides an overview of the latest trends in Java development for 2020.

# Java Press Release No. 1
According to a survey conducted by JRebel, 58% of respondents still use Java 8, despite the upcoming release of Java 15 in September 2020. This solid attachment for Java 8 is due to the public updates and long-term support (LTS) that Java developers have enjoyed for so long, both for commercial and personal use. Unhappily, Oracle has recently stopped updating Java 8 for commercial use, and the public update will suffer the same fate in December 2020. As a result, Oracle encourages its followers to upgrade to the latest Java version rather than commit to a single performance.

Java is one of the newest programming languages. Oracle releases a new version of Java every six months to update the programming language and continuously fill the gaps for Java users. The development kit (JDK 14) release in March 2020.

Java 14 includes 16 significant enhancements, including datasets to make class declarations more compact, NullPointer exceptions, which are exception messages generated by the JVM, text blocks to insert HTML, XML, SQL, and JSON snippets into code, and instance matching. JDK 14 also includes the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) for Windows and macOS, Parallel GC for scheduling parallel tasks, a new API for the JDK Flight Recorder (JFR), an updated version of the Apache sanctuary library, and more.

#2 Spring Framework Releases

If you are familiar with Java, you are most likely using the Spring framework and its diverse ecosystem. Recently, Spring 5.0 released with some important updates:

Redesign of the core framework ;
Faster application startup time;
Support for the Java-based Kotlin programming language;
The reactive programming model for better API implementation and asynchronous data flow management;
Improved testing with JUnit 5 Jupiter to write and run Jupiter-based tests in spring;

In addition to the Spring framework, reactive programming features also expected in Spring Data, Spring Security, Spring Integration, and other Spring-related frameworks. These features allow building sustainable systems capable of handling high traffic flows and heavy system loads.

The Spring framework is not the only framework that supports Java. You can find many other structures and tools with the newest updates that present answers for particular tasks. For instance, JavaScript frameworks like Angular and React use for single page application development, Apache Spark is ideal for data analysis, Hibernate use for Java web application development, etc.

#3 Move from Microservices to a Serverless Architecture.
The use of microservices is not a current aim in Java. Web services allow you to break up your code into smaller pieces, making them more self-contained and easier to develop, deploy, replace, and manage.

The microservices architecture is ideal for the public cloud because it relies on elastic scaling with on-demand resources. To simplify the development of microservices applications, Java developers typically use Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

In terms of Java trends, a new wave of microservices moves towards a serverless architecture which means that you don't need a server to build and deploy your code. Using a cloud-based Backend as a Service (BaaS) solution, you don't have to worry about infrastructure management or system maintenance and can focus primarily on developing your application.

The serverless architecture allows you to break your code into even smaller pieces than in microservices architecture, allowing your applications to scale infinitely. Besides, developers can improve performance and reduce potential problems and bottlenecks by visualizing development processes.

To combine serverless and microservices architectures, Java developers turn to Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically Lambda AWS. However, you can use a variety of other cloud solutions, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure.

#4 Big Data Tools for Java
As computing power increases and information grows exponentially, more and more companies are turning to Big Data. Java offers a wide range of open-source tools such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Mahout, JFreechart, and Deeplearning4j for efficient Big Data processing.

With machine learning and Big Data being a hot topic in computing, more and more technologies are emerging to provide more efficient processing data methods. It offers better batch processing performance by computing everything in memory instead of storing data in memory, thus diminishing.

#5 Unit Testing
Testing is an essential part of writing code. It proves that your code is usable and minimizes bugs or errors, so you don't have to do the same work twice - finding errors and rewriting. However, creating tests is a time-consuming activity, especially if you build a complex application in Java. It is, therefore, essential to improve your testing skills by writing automated unit tests. To this end, Java developers can use various libraries, frameworks, and testing tools such as JUnit, Mockito, Robot Framework, Selenium, REST-Assured, Cucumber, etc.

#6 Mastering Git
Another popular trend in Java is logging code changes and tracking software projects in Git and GitHub. The movement of migrating projects from SVN and CVS to Git and GitHub is currently gaining momentum among developers, which is not surprising because Git and GitHub offer diverse and essential features for tracking changes to source code and controlling application versions.

Git has many advantages over common CVSs. It's open-source, free, fast, and has easy backup and branch management features with GitHub. This online-hosted repository offers all the features of Git and allows developers to save their code online and share it with other developers on different projects.

Summary

The Java programming language originated in the 1990s and has since enjoyed enduring popularity among software developers due to its robust functionality, easy-to-understand English syntax, and support for cross-platform application development.

Advances in modern computing technology have prompted Java to continually update its features to remain competitive with other programming languages. These features introduce in response to global development trends. As a result, developers using Java can provide a wide range of software development services using this technology, from comprehensive desktop application development to cross-platform web and mobile applications.

It is clear that Java is a programming language that will stay with us for a long time, and if you need to develop a reliable and efficient solution for your business you can look at top java development companies.