Even faced with increased competition from the likes of .Net, Java is nowhere near the end of its life, Info-Tech's report concluded. The platform has incredibly strong allies and an immense code base. Just as user sites must tend to legacy Cobol code, so will they have to tend to a lot of Java code in the future. "[Java is] not going to disappear," Goodall said.

Rails framework founder David Heinemeier Hansson also likened Java to Cobol. "I think Java is still relevant in the sense that languages never die. There will be systems running in Java 20 years from now," he said, "just like there are still lots of Cobol systems around from way back when."

New frameworks are gaining traction among developers
"Ruby, PHP, Python, and similar platforms have definitely taken a big chunk out of the Java brain trust," said Hansson. "We have a large constituency of Rails users who are Java refugees."

New frameworks such as PHP and Ruby on Rails indeed "have taken a huge bite out of the territory that used to belong to Java and .Net," said Tim Bray, Sun's director of Web technologies -- emphasizing that .Net has the same issue. "I totally don't believe, based on what I see, that .Net still has the kind of growth that it had for a few years there starting in the late 1990s.The evidence seems to show that while Java isn't the hottest growth spot, it's still the largest single ecosystem out there," he added.

Hansson agrees that .Net is also threatened by new frameworks, but he noted that .Net nevertheless seems to be taking away mindshare from Java in shops predisposed to use Microsoft technology.

A program manager at a government agency, who wished to remain anonymous, said solutions such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft products are offering alternatives to Java. "On the server side, Java will always have a place in stitching things together and customizing, but to turn out nice applications quickly that are maintainable, I see the other tools starting to take over that space," the program manager said.

Sun looks ahead to a world where Java may not be king
At Sun, CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains a staunch Java advocate but acknowledges Java is not the only contestant in the show these days. At the SugarCon 2008 conference for SugarCRM users earlier this month, Schwartz noted Sun's Da Vinci Machine project to extend the JVM to accommodate other languages. "The intent is to say, 'Look, Java is one language, but it is not a hammer for all nails. It happens to be a really, really good hammer,'" Schwartz said.

Bray admits that the Java language "is starting to look a little boring to the young rabble-rousers in the community," and says the Java language is "replaceable." However, Bray argues that the Java platform -- the JVM, APIs, and libraries -- is here to stay. The JVM is "insanely popular," and the consensus is the libraries are about the best, he said.

In anticipation of a less Java-centric world, Sun is working to embrace the new technologies. Case in point is the JRuby effort to enable Ruby to run Rails applications on the Java platform, Bray said. Meanwhile, work is being done to spruce up the Java language with closures and other capabilities, he said. (Closures lets pieces of code be passed around and used elsewhere without the need to declare a subroutine.)

Rails founder Hansson agrees with Sun's direction. "I do think the mentality of 'Java is the answer, what was the question again?' is gone. Even Sun realizes that now, which I think is healthy. There are lots of domains where Java is just too heavy and cumbersome an environment to dance with."