The future of Java middleware

I'm speaking at QCon London again this year and it's on a topic I've been working on for a number of years: where is (Java) middleware going? I'm not going to spoil things too much here, but suffice it to say that anyone who has heard me talk about middleware over the years, probably won't be surprised. I'll blog more about it after the event.

My presentation may be on Java, but what I've got to say transcends any particular language implementation. If Java hadn't come along and we were all still happily working on C++, then I'd be saying similar things. The middleware component of the larger software industry is at an inflexion point and no, Cloud didn't cause it: we've been heading towards this event at full speed for several years. We can either keep heading blindly down the route of inventing bespoke wheels that are often just as round as their cousins elsewhere, or we can start to think and work more efficiently.

I obviously can't speak on behalf of other vendors, but I can say that JBoss will be heading in the right direction! Of course this does not mean we are ditching Java Enterprise Edition, or any of the other investments we've made! But we have been expanding over the years from just JBossAS to other things like Hibernate, ESB, portal, etc. I see what we need to do over the next few years as just another evolution of what we've been doing. And if you look around at the plethora of projects we've got on JBoss.org then you'll be able to see that we've been heading in the direction I'm hinting at for some time.

The next few years are going to be exciting for JBoss. I'm also hoping that we can energise the open source communities as a whole around some of these ideas so that a wider audience can participate and benefit. Like I said ... exciting!