The Java Market

The Java Market

According to Oracle, Java is the most popular and ubiquitous runtime available, with the following statistics as of January 2010:

• 9 million Java developers
• 840 million Java desktop installations
• 100+ different hardware platforms supported million Java desktop installations
  • 2 million additional downloads per day
• Used by all of the Fortune 100 companies
• 5.5 billion Java cards
• 2.6 billion Java-enabled cell phones
  • 250 partner cell phone carriers
  • 100,000+ Java ME applications
• 40 million TVs and Blu-ray players

Java continues to be the most widely used single programming language today, edged out only by all scripting languages grouped together. But since Java the platform supports running applications written in various scripting languages, these numbers can be said to overlap. For instance, the Java virtual machine (JVM) will execute applications written in Java, Rexx, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, PHP Groovy, Clojure, and Scala. In many cases, Sun's HotSpot JVM will run these applications better than their natively compiled counterparts because the just-in-time (JIT) compiler will re-optimize the compiled code over time according to execution characteristics.

The bottom line is that Java has remained the language and/or platform of choice for enterprise and web application development for many years, and it continues to grow. With Java freely available for development use, and its use as the language of choice in many college computer-science curriculums, Java will likely remain at the top for many years to come.