 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Brian Grace Lee. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco, on Howard Street in the middle of the street in the Cloud Plaza, Oracle Cloud Plaza, which is the big exhibit here at Oracle OpenWorld. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. My co-host, Brian Grace Lee, analysts at Wikibon with the Cloud, our next guest at Georgetown, Vice President of Development, Java platform at Oracle. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. So 20 years anniversary for Java, we're here on the behind desk. 20 years, it makes me feel old because Java was a language when I got my hands on it. It was like, wow, this is really amazing. Totally big, functional, great language. 20 years in, a lot of new languages, a lot of competition, so to speak. A lot of young developers who have never loaded Unix, or Linux, they just want Cloud, they want data. So what's the 20 year vibe here? What's the theme and what are you guys doing? Yeah, the vibe here is just fantastic. The Java developers are a wonderful set of people. There's just like lots of enthusiasm and people coming, both to hear about the things that have happened in the last 20 years and also looking forward at new development that's being done towards future versions. So Java is one of those languages that a lot of people are using and certainly that's the old guys who loved it. But now the young guns are coming in. They're looking at a lot of real time for like Node.js, a lot of open source is now mainstream. This all built under an open source fabric. How do you talk to that diversity of opportunities? Certainly this functional diversity, this tool for this job. How do you guys talk about that as the new young generation comes in and as software is the center of all the action right now? So how do you speak to that? I think there's a kind of a combination of things. So on the one hand, there have never been more languages and sort of diversity out there and things for people to choose from. On the other hand, many people find as they start to experiment with different things that the things that are tried and true, solid, secure, reliable performance are actually worth more than ever. Another interesting trend that we've seen a lot of is people writing new languages to run on the JVM. So that's quite a neat thing to see happening as well. And then finally, we've been investing in, trying to make sure that the technology is refreshed, is new, is up to date, and not just kind of resting on our laurels of being the most popular platform in the world. Can you give some specific examples of the Java renaissance and growth? I mean, where people are using it? I mean, be specific, some really key example. Sure. We've seen a lot of companies out there. We're kind of used to the large companies on Wall Street and that kind of thing using it, as well as people using it to power sort of mission critical things. But we're also seeing now a lot of startups turning to Java as they get to the point where they actually need to scale, right? So they may have experimented with a few other things to try to get something up quickly, but when they get to the point where they need to make sure that it's going to be solid and take them where they need to go, then they move that. So we saw that recently with Twitter and some other companies like that. So it's quite nice. So what's next for the Java platform? Where you guys investing? This is an area that people want to know more about. Obviously, software's eating the world. You've seen software-defined data center. Software-defined everything now. I mean, software's at the center of the value proposition. What are you guys investing in? Well, I think there are a couple of things. We're investing heavily in Java in the cloud because we're seeing a lot of people wanting to use Java in cloud environments. So thinking through the places and the things that we can do to really make that easy. We also are always looking at future hardware trends in order to make sure that the tools that you have available in Java and the way the implementation is done is as good as it can be, not only for the hardware today, but also for the hardware of the future. And we're going to talk about that a bunch in the keynote today. Yeah, so this show has got a ton of Fortune 500, Fortune 2000, some of the biggest names are here. We're seeing, we've seen it for the last six months, a lot around Internet of Things. And a lot of that is moving. There's lots of directions, but the Internet of Things around industrial manufacturing, around fleets and so forth. What are you hearing as you talk to those large customers? Because sometimes people think of Java as a heavyweight protocol, sometimes it's got a large footprint. You start getting into small devices. What's that conversation looks like for IoT plus Java? Well, there are really a couple of places there, right? So on the one hand, you have all of these devices. You also have a lot of data that's being created, right? And that data is going to a backend somewhere. Now typically those backends are already written in Java, right? But it's also very, very useful to be able to do smarter things either at a point where you're aggregating or even all the way on the edge in the device itself. And there's really no better technology for doing that than Java. And in fact, there are versions of Java that are extremely lightweight and work really, really well in those kinds of environments. Yeah, so that's fantastic. We're starting to see, especially, John talked about sort of these newer generations. We're seeing new cloud platforms come along, especially kind of newer middleware. Java's obviously a huge piece of fusion, but maybe the next Twitter, the next Airbnb comes along, they're building a lot themselves. How do you think about sort of your role as driving the Java platform versus Java in the core Oracle space? Do you look at both sides of that sort of what's coming new and fusion or do you try and stay focused in the Oracle space? Yeah, there's a lot of synergy. I mean, as you can imagine, it's immensely useful for us working on Java SE, having a bunch of groups in the same company that we can talk to and find out about what things work and what they're worried about and what some of their pain points are. It's also, I think, the case that, as we're looking forward to people running things in the cloud, whether they be on a traditional middleware but run as cloud services, or it's completely new in different cloud services, we're seeing that they're choosing Java as the technology of choice for the underpinning. James Gosling was talking about robots and Raspberry Pi, a lot of innovation, a lot of tinker, it's a maker culture now. And one of the things that I've been seeing, certainly within our team and customer bases, is that Java is interoperating with a lot of these smaller, lightweight languages for the IoT stuff, like Raspberry Pi and some other things. So how do you keep it sexy? How do you keep winning the developers' hearts and minds with Java? And at Java One, how do you guys keep it so strong? I mean, every year, it's like, it's the death of Java. I hear it over and over again. Java's all, you know, this and that. But it actually works well for our dashboarding, it's great for heavy-glypting coding. Yeah. Is that how you see it? I mean, how do you guys win the hearts and minds of developers? So what I'd say is, you know, really, since Oracle became the steward of Java, we've really been trying to reinvigorate the development of Java itself. So looking at things that people want to do. So as an example, in the Java 8 release, we had something called Project Lambda, which allows you to write closures in Java, bringing a more functional style of programming. So a lot of these other technologies you're talking about, like people are actually really interested in, you know, getting towards a functional style of programming, you can do that today in Java. On the development teams, it's all agile now, right? And so I got to ask you, what specifically do you want to lay out at Java 1 this week? What do you say to the attendees at Java 1 this week? So we're saying congratulations and thanks for 20 years of Java and look forward to another 20 years of strong technology for the Java SAT. Great, that's awesome. I got to ask you a personal question. You know what I mean? Us computer science guys lived in a generation where open source was kind of radical. Now it's tier one. So now the open source thing is so strong. It is a first class citizen. And so software, world has changed. What have you learned over the years and the 20 years looking at the Java evolution? It's importance, obviously, it's historic. We see that, obviously it's great. But what have you learned and what's been magnified learnings for you over the past 20 years and put that in context to the next 20? So I would say that I've learned that it is just amazing what a community of developers can achieve working well together, working transparently, communicating, rolling up their sleeves and getting things done. I've also learned a lot about the importance of compatibility, things remaining stable. And you're knowing that the program that you wrote many, many years ago on an early version of Java still runs today just much, much, much faster. What are the top conversations that you're involved in? I mean, obviously you obviously see a big part of the business and it's really relevant. I'll see a developer standpoint. What are the top three conversations you're involved with, with developers and customers? So I think there's in general an interest in the things that are coming. And so a lot of the discussion actually is about helping people understand what things are out there that they can already find and look at in order to understand what the future looks like. We definitely have people who are interested in taking what they've done in the past and moving it to a new environment, whether it be to the cloud or whether it be to a small device. There's a lot of interest in that as well. A lot of confusion too around Java and where it fits. We, you addressed that. But one of the things I'm super excited about is we interview a lot of folks from women in tech to, you know, suffer on education where computer science, where we're passionate about getting it into the core, like math, science and elementary schools all the way down to that level. But certainly at high school, you're seeing Java be the cornerstone of it. So it's not like eat your spinach, you know, programming, kind of like kids are using it. Here you have over 450 kids at Java one that's three times more than last year. Kids are digging Java right now. And because of the, how do you make sense of that? How do you explain that? Well, I think there are a lot of reasons for it. I think one of the main reasons is it's fairly easy to get started with. And, you know, if it's well written, it's pretty easy to understand it. And I think that's a really big part. You know, there are some languages that make things really easy to create, but then they become sort of an un-maintainable soup. Thankfully, you know, Java encourages people to write things in a way that's actually, you know, usually pretty easy to understand if you're coming across it the first time. And we were just at the Grace Hopper event in the Houston of Women in Computing. It's interesting, they have the one hour coding. And I was talking to one of the professors, they're like, hey, you know what? These kids these days, it's not about being a geek, nerd or dork. They don't even use those terms anymore because everyone's programming now. People from football players down to cheerleaders to everybody's now interested in coding. Maybe because of the gamification, but it's computers are cool, right? Software's very cool now. So it's just great for me because what I was doing with software, it was not as cool as it is today. It was not as cool, was it? So what's the coolest thing that you've seen? Obviously the kids is impressive, the 450 kids. What is the coolest thing you've seen? Well, I'll tell you, I just thought it was super cool yesterday with all of the kids in this program, you know, going through classes. They gave up, you know, an entire Saturday to sit inside. And one of the neatest things about that was it wasn't only kids coming and getting taught by adults. There were a bunch of sessions where kids who had gone through the program last year came back and gave the courses. And I think that's pretty tremendous. Yeah, I think it's a total renaissance. I think it's like, it's gonna be very interesting 20 years. What's your view of the next 20? What do you mean? Just shoot the arrow forward. I mean, don't put the oracle hat on, put your personal hat on, yeah, so we don't get in trouble. I think the whole world is gonna be writing Java. It's gonna be awesome. Java, obviously great, heavy, heavy lifting tool. It's really, you know, really amazing stuff. So continuing, but also integrating with a lot of the other stuff like node real time. I mean, how's that all gonna jive together? How do you see that coming together? Well, I think that some of the trends we've seen with Polyglot are going to continue, right? People are sort of at the point where they understand that they're not necessarily gonna have one language that does everything they need. They're gonna have kind of a mix. And so it's really gonna be important for these languages to kind of work well together. And for people to be able to sort of master different styles that are appropriate for different things that they're doing. So final question, what's your plans for this week? Obviously, we're kicking off. It's Sunday here, it's beautiful out in San Francisco. It's no rain, it's gorgeous. What's your plans? And what's the bumper sticker for this show? So two questions, what's your plans this week? What are you gonna do? Break it down for us. And then to put a bumper sticker on this show in advance so people can get a feel for what's gonna happen. Well, let's say you got back to back meetings lined up just about every day. I'm gonna be meeting with a lot of customers. I'm gonna be meeting with a lot of developers. It actually started for me already early this morning with the breakfast with Java user group leaders and the Java champions. Are people pumped? They are super excited about it. And the bumper sticker for this show, this week's cloud, all about cloud. It's gonna be Java in the cloud, how about that? Java in the cloud, that's the bumper sticker. Okay, we're live here on Howard Street, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back with more after this short break, for more. We're podcasting, go to SiliconANGLE.tv. Every Wednesday we feature a women in Wednesday on SiliconANGLE.tv and of course we have guests of the week, our favorite interview as voted by the crowd and our editors at SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE will vote for our guests of the week. That's a dedicated podcast. So go to SiliconANGLE.tv for that. We'll be right back, more live here at Oracle Open World and Java One here on Sunday after this short break.