Java needs continued productivity increases and must accommodate non-relational data stores like to thrive in the cloud, said Spring founder Rod Johnson, senior vice president at VMware, at the Jax Java conference in San Jose, Calif. But these issues are in the process of being addressed, he said.

"A lot of this is coming from the open source community," Johnson said. He cited the Spring Data project for data access as an example of a project that would improve Java for the cloud. "If Java does not really seize the lead in cloud computing in the next year, I think it has a much greater chance of being eclipsed by languages like Ruby."

Johnson, as he has done in recent years, emphasized his cloud-is-inevitable mantra. He stressed that fewer than 30 percent of IT expenditures go toward developing new functionality; most of the expense is for managing legacy systems. Cloud computing provides a solution to this problem, he explain. "This is the fundamental reason that cloud computing is important." Unlike SOA, cloud computing is not a buzzword driven by vendor hype, said Johnson. "This one, I think, is different. Enterprise middleware, as we know it, will cease to exist."

Current methods in which IT deploys application servers, messaging brokers, and other software will give way to organizations either working with public clouds or their own private PaaS rather than dealing with low-level infrastructure components, which is complex, Johnson said. He also noted that Java is a good fit for PaaS, offering a programming model such as Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) or Spring.