[gshx]

Thanks for the bullets. This is a good list but some of the points like "Easily scalable" and "DB support" are not cheaply available in any runtime and require careful attention to detail as well as domain-specific thinking. IMHO, the JVM already does a lot of heavy-lifting in this regard.

[haalcion3]

It comes down to this: are those developing the language thinking about how to add features just to try to hone and hold on to the enterprise developers that still use it, or are they thinking about what would make it more fun, productive, and practical?

Java's going to be around a long time. Those that stick with it will be fine. COBOL programmers made a lot of money in 1999, and some people still use Fortran.

But, Java's original big mantra was "write once, run anywhere." Such idealism then. Cool things have been done in the past few years, but can't we do more?

[parasubvert]

I work for Pivotal so I'm biased. But I'd take a long look at Sprint Boot in terms of "fun , productive , practical" Java: https://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/

In particular: - curated and tested open source library dependencies to the point that you can generate a single JAR for anything you might want to build on the server: http://start.spring.io/

- Annotations and APIs to make REST service development a breeze

- native support to build apps that use SQL, NoSQL and other Data systems without plumbing: http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/refe...

- SSH shell/CLI into your JVM to manage your JVM

- Actuator to provide production metrics for your system

- declarative security that allows you to build Oauth2 enabled apps in maybe 20 lines of code/annotations

- great symbiosis with modern JavaScript for responsive sites, eg https://spring.io/blog/2015/01/12/spring-and-angular-js-a-se...

- Cloud connectors to make it easy to run your app on Heroku, Kubernetes, Mesos or Cloud Foundry, or to leverage NetflixOSS components, or to build stream processing applications (Spring cloud stream / data flow)

It is being downloaded and used at a very high rate (a couple million a month).

[snuxoll]

Spring Boot is awesome, thank you guys for your massive contribution. All of my co-workers are .Net guys and keep trying to say that Java is dead now that .Net Core is out, but I still haven't found a server-side solution better than Spring yet :)

[parasubvert]

Hey thanks ... .NET core is awesome too, they should check out http://www.steeltoe.io/ for our attempt to bring Spring love their way :p

[snuxoll]

Cool, but much less useful than the full suite of Spring projects (which is why I love Spring in the first place, it's basically batteries included but everything remains modular so I can pick and choose what I want). .Net Core is a great stepping stone, but between deployment headaches (I can just run yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk to get a JVM and run a spring-boot app, .Net Core forces me to bundle the runtime right now) and the lack of a cohesive integrated suite of components keeps my heart with Spring (even if I'm forced to use .Net at work more often than not).