Microsoft Amps up its Support for Java Developers with a New Website

Microsoft today announced the launch of a new website designed to provide Java developers with a new level of support in the form of tools and resources that enable them to code, deploy, and scale their apps more productively.

The website is another brick in the foundation of support for Java developers that Microsoft has been building over the last couple of years (which my colleague, David Ramel, has been tracking quite diligently in Visual Studio Magazine.) The new site is chock-a-block (pun intended) with content and links to technical documentation, learning paths, and on-demand videos from Microsoft conferences and its Java Cloud Developer Advocacy team.

The list of resources provided by the site includes:

• Documentation, videos, and samples designed to help Java developers build and scale efficiently on Microsoft Azure and other operating systems

• A PDF that outlines how to code, deploy, and scale Java development meant to empower developers to use any tool, framework, and/or application server on any operating system

• A white paper that illustrates best practices from Microsoft on how the company itself uses Java, including significant parts of its business.

"Many people are surprised to learn that we’re using Java to run significant parts of Microsoft," wrote Julia Liuson, President of Microsoft's Developer Division, in a blog post, "and to empower thousands of customers to do the same."

Liuson pointed out that Bing, Microsoft’s web search engine, which also powers the search feature in the Windows Start menu, uses Java to perform indexing-related functions. She also cited Azure’s infrastructure control plane and other divisions, such as LinkedIn, Minecraft, and Yammer, that use Java extensively. And Microsoft has deployed more than two million Java virtual machines (JVMs) for the company's "internal systems and business needs," she said.

As I reported in July, Microsoft joined two working groups in the Eclipse Foundation this year: the Jakarta EE Working Group, which focuses on the overall evolution of enterprise Java, and the MicroProfile Working Group, which focuses on optimizing enterprise Java for a microservices architecture. Microsoft also supports several other Java community organizations, including OpenJDK, and Eclipse Adoptium, Jakarta EE, and the venerable Java Community Process. And in 2019, it acquired leading Java app optimizer jClarity.

Redmond has partnered with a truly impressive number of leading vendors in the Java ecosystem. Azure Spring Apps, for example, was developed jointly with Pivotal /VMWare to provide native integrations with third-party application performance monitoring (APM) tools from New Relic, App Dynamics, Dynatrace, and Elastic. Microsoft's list of jointly developed solutions also includes Red Hat JBoss EAP on Azure App Service, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Liberty, and Open Liberty on Azure, Oracle WebLogic Server on Azure VMs and Azure Kubernetes Service, and Apache Kafka for Confluent Cloud. The has also attracted marquee names to Java on its Azure cloud platform, including  Adobe, AIA, Bosch, Daimler, FedEx, J.B. Hunt, Kroger, Maersk, Mercedes Benz, and Swiss Re. 
 
The new website also links to an ebook entitled Code, Deploy, And Scale Java Your Way: Empowered Java Application Development in The Cloud. It's about building, migrating, and scaling Java apps on Azure. In the foreword, the author, Asir Selvasingh, a Principal Architect for Java on Microsoft Azure, writes: "I have witnessed Microsoft’s commitment to the Java ecosystem from the first row consistently for many years now…. Today, more and more Java developers are looking at how they can bring their existing Java applications to the cloud, or at how to build new cloud-native applications. This e-book covers the entire journey for developers and operators to code, deploy, and scale with confidence." (The author is worth following on Twitter.)

Another ebook linked to the site, How Microsoft Applies Java: The Inside Story, was written by Bruno Borges, Principal PM Manager in Microsoft's Java Engineering Group, and Theresa Nguyen, Senior Product Manager in that group. It's a great timeline of Microsoft's evolution from days of the Holy War on Anything Not .NET or Windows to its all-in embrace of open-source technologies.

Microsoft's commitment to Java has been real for some time, so that's not actually news, but I do think this latest step in the company's evolving investment in Java is worth reporting—and for you Java jocks out there, the website is worth a look.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 30, 2022