Solving modern application development challenges with Java

Recently, 451 Research published a report on how organizations are modernizing business applications. The study explored survey responses on how organizations plan to modernize applications to maintain competitiveness, enhance customer service and improve operational efficiency. The survey showed that 38% of respondents plan to retain existing applications on-premises while incorporating newer application architectures, and another 29% plan to refactor and re-architect applications using modern architectures like cloud native frameworks. In a recent Oracle webcast about how some organizations solve today’s application development challenges with Java, Manish Gupta, Vice President of Marketing, Java and GraalVM at Oracle talked about the challenges and considerations of today's application modernization journey. 

Challenges:

Every organization has different goals requiring different strategies and tools for their transition. Some plan to keep applications running in their data centers to minimize reworking those that are functioning but may need a performance boost. Others build new applications either on-premises or in the cloud using modern architectural styles like microservices. But every strategy comes with challenges like:

• Spending more money and resources updating existing applications
• Training developers to use new tools and processes when moving applications to the cloud or developing new cloud native applications.

Solution: 

In the app dev world, the Java programming language has proven longevity, now in its 27^th year, and is in a good position to power future application development. Java continues to improve and innovate with every release, providing features that enhance portability, adaptability, performance, and predictability required in today’s fast-moving environment. 

The original goal for Java was “write once, run anywhere”. This ensures that Java applications are portable and can run on a variety of platforms. It is also adaptable due in large part to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that optimizes any size program for any hardware and workload as the application warms up. But in today’s digital economy, adaptability also means running applications in the cloud. And when architecting for cloud native, developers are building applications using many small components called microservices that need to warm up and execute at runtime.

Recent innovations in Java also enable developers to boost the performance of the JVM that is running code. Java SE Subscription now entitles developers to GraalVM Enterprise at no additional cost. This entitlement includes access to the GraalVM Native Image feature that compiles applications ahead-of-time (AOT), enabling programs to warm up before runtime. It generates small, self-contained executables that don’t require warm-up and use fewer memory resources. The native executables enable microservices to scale to thousands of cores, minimize required resources, and reduce operational costs. All these benefits make GraalVM Native Image the ideal tool to modernize Java applications on-premises or in the cloud. Java SE Subscription also provides organizations the predictability required to build quality software that will work well and ensure backward compatibility with existing infrastructure. The subscription includes periodic releases with new capabilities and performance enhancements at a regular cadence. 

Manish reflects on how every organization's application modernization project is a journey and not a goal. Organizations need to understand how they want their business to evolve, assess their appetite for business risk, and look for solutions that have longevity and continued innovation. Java moves the world forward by enabling applications to adapt to today’s software needs. Watch the on-demand webcast to learn more.