At an Oracle DevLive Level Up event, Oracle today announced the availability of a Java 20 update that makes a range of innovations more accessible to application development teams.

Georges Saab, senior vice president of development for the Java Platform and chair of the OpenJDK Governing Board for Oracle, said the latest version of the venerable programming language builds on previous extensions made to the Java development kit (JDK) that exemplify how the pace of Java innovation is now increasing.

Specifically, seven JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) are now supported in Java 20, including OpenJDK project Amber for record patterns and pattern matching for switch expressions and statements; enhancements from OpenJDK Project Panama to interconnect Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), features related to Project Loom that streamline the process of writing, maintaining and observing high-throughput, concurrent applications and a Function & Memory application programming interface (API) and Vector API.

Oracle also revealed Java 20 is supported by Java Management Service, an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) native service that provides a single pane of glass to help organizations manage Java runtimes and applications on-premises or on any cloud.

Finally, Oracle is making available an Oracle Java Universal SE Subscription that provides access to a pay-as-you-go offering that includes entitlement to GraalVM Enterprise, the Java SE Subscription Enterprise Performance Pack, access to the advanced features of the Java Management Service and the flexibility to upgrade at any pace an organization prefers.

Oracle Java Standard Edition (SE), GraalVM Enterprise and the Java SE Subscription Enterprise Performance Pack are also now available free of charge on OCI.

Despite the number of programming language alternatives that exist, many enterprise IT organizations remain committed to Java. Rather than opting to retrain developers, it’s simply been more cost-effective to enable developers to continue to build applications using a programming language they already know.

Java itself, meanwhile, has been experiencing a renaissance after more organizations began contributing to projects once the core platform became available under an open source OpenJDK license. In fact, the Java community is now adopting many concepts pioneered in other programming languages to enable organizations to, for example, drive digital business transformation initiatives that are dependent on legacy applications that are being modernized. As part of those efforts, the rate at which Java applications are being deployed in the cloud has substantially increased.

As part of those efforts, many organizations are currently in the process of shifting to Java 17. It’s not clear how many organizations will skip Java 17 and jump to Java 20 from previous versions of Java, but DevOps teams should expect to be supporting a wide range of versions of Java for years to come.

In fact, most organizations will deploy Java applications everywhere from the network edge to the cloud. The one thing all these applications will have in common is they will be written in a programming language that has persevered through two decades and appears to have enough staying power to stick around well into the next.