Red Hat has transitioned into a leadership role for the OpenJDK 6 project, effectively extending support for the technology and its users. The move reinforces Red Hat’s commitment to the broader Java community and its future as a leading platform for mission-critical enterprise applications.

In addition to taking on leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, Red Hat maintains its role in setting the future direction for the OpenJDK project as an active board member, represented by Red Hat’s long-time Java technical lead, Andrew Haley, enabling the company to continue to help drive the future of Java and of OpenJDK. Red Hat’s vision includes better overall performance and manageability while enabling greater functionality around dynamic scalability and cloud computing.

“To say that Java plays an important role in today’s enterprise IT would be an understatement,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat. “It has had a profound impact on the creation and integration of technologies that have ushered us into the 21st century, shaping everything from banking and retail to transportation and research, and Red Hat is leading the charge. We want to see that continue, not only for the thousands of organizations running OpenJDK 6 and Java SE 6, but for users of future versions as well.”

OpenJDK is an open source implementation of the Java specification. Red Hat has been a leading contributor to the OpenJDK community for more than five years, following an agreement with Sun Microsystems, and its customers have enjoyed the benefit of a highly optimized, accelerated runtime for Red Hat JBoss Middleware in a Linux environment.

“Red Hat has done well to stand by its decision to continue supporting and investing in Java,” said Al Hilwa, program director for IDC’s Application Development Software research. “The company’s leadership and success as an open source enterprise technology provider give credibility to its vision for the future of OpenJDK and goal of driving innovation in Java.”

Java is a preeminent fixture in the global software development community. According to GitHub, one of the top open source code repository sites, Java continues to be among the most popular languages today, as well as being one of the highest-tagged languages on Stack Overflow, a user-driven question and answer site for topics related to programming. Other languages, including Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Gosu and Ceylon, only run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), contributing to its popularity. This sentiment is also reflected in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages, calculated from the number of search engine results for queries containing the name of the language.