Java, he said, was moving beyond the era of the monolithic application server presented by products like IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic, formerly a BEA product. "Those products are complex. They're far more complex than the language," Johnson said. The most widely deployed application server is the much simpler Apache Tomcat server, he said.

Developers, Johnson said, have been empowered in the past 10 years. "There's been a very profound shift toward developers making choices rather than just working with products that senior management might buy," he said, citing the Eclipse IDE as an example of such a choice. "Eclipse is something that kind of got in under the radar," because it was popular with developers, he said.