This discussion often happens around JVM languages or dead-end projects that will need to be maintained until the end of the universe. If that's all that remai

This discussion often happens around JVM languages or dead-end projects that will need to be maintained until the end of the universe. If that's all that remains, then yeah, I'd say Java is dying, because people won't be actively writing new, interesting code in Java. A couple of projects that suggest Java may not be dying (quite yet) are Roo and GWT. Roo is a spring-based framework that is very Rails-esque in terms of getting a web application up and running very quickly, though I haven't looked through much of the code. GWT is (as almost everyone knows) a very powerful framework for creating rich internet applications. It's a really major departure from page-based technologies. Aside from that, there are still other projects like Guice, Gin, Struts 2 (and other MVC frameworks), ORM type work, and so forth (many of which are often used with GWT and are rolled into Roo). While I've looked into these, none of them are enough to make me want to make a switch (back) from Ruby to Java programming. But I do think there's still enough going on there that I really wouldn't say Java is dying as a language that people use to build web applications (and I don't mean purely as a JVM or legacy code thing...) Some of the top innovation is still happening in Javaland.