Gerrit Grunwald a JavaOne rockstar and Java Champion is again with us at JPrime Conference in Sofia,!! We have the pleasure to make a short interview with him.

Switching to online was not a big difference to me, I did that already before the pandemic. But I will be honest with you, I’m not a big fan of it. You really miss the connection with the people. So in-person events are still my favourite and I avoid online events whenever I can :)

I know that there are lots of desktop apps out there which are based on Java and I think this won’t change in the near future. Java is big in the industry and it comes with thousands of free libraries. It’s simply very convenient to make use of this ecosystem. And for big companies it’s easy to find Java developers.

In IoT I think the place for Java is of course on the server side but also on so called Gateways that are connected the edge devices. Also message brokers for mqtt are anplace where Java has it’s place.

You are right, there are around 15-20 OpenJDK distributions with different flavors. Most of them are builds of OpenJDK and some of them come with special features related to garbage collections, compilers etc. Some are optimised for cloud services, others are optimised for architectures like ARM. I think we won’t see an ongoing growth in new distributions and the future will tell if there is a place for all of those distributions. We also saw some coming which are already not supported anymore. In addition to this we also have different builds of GraalVM which is the new kid on the block. It has some interesting features like an Java based compiler that replaces C2 and the ability to create native images. In short I think there is a bright future ahead for us developers with lot’s of choice…which is a good thing :) .