I would like to take a moment to thank Ben Walding and Bob McWhirter who were behind the Codehaus, one of the most prominent opensource Java project community and hosting platform ever.

The writing was probably on the wall for some time, and today they announced the end of Codehaus:

The time has come to end the era of Codehaus.

With increasing diversity in opensource hosting platforms like Github and Bitbucket - who are meeting the needs of 1000s of projects - it makes sense to end the opensource hosting services of Codehaus.

Codehaus has operated at a loss for several years now (we’re not powered by venture capital), and can not compete with the army of developers and integrated product offerings that are now commonplace.

Codehaus was selective on projects: you would not get your project here just like you would open a SourceForge project in a few click. Codehaus was a space made by and for hackers, with fewer constraints than Apache-style foundations.

Codehaus was the place to find Groovy, the widely-used Mojo Maven plugins, XStream, Jackson, Castor, PicoContainer, early versions of Drools, EasyMock, early versions of Gradle, Grails, Griffon, pre-Eclipse Jetty, Jettison, StAX, XDoclet and many more.

I remember how proud I was when I managed to move IzPack there. IzPack gained serious traction by joining Codehaus, and the project hosting infrastructure was top notch.

I can’t help but look back and realize how much the Java landscape has changed since Codehaus was at its peak. The vast majority of the Codehaus projects are now either dead or simply very rooted in the past, forming legacies from a significant era of the Java history.

That being said the closing of Codehaus is not to be perceived as a sign of the so often predicted end of Java. Tools and practices evolve, and the Java ecosystem is never short of new blood influx. The future of the JVM as a foundation for increasingly simpler and efficient programming models is bright.

Again: thanks Ben, thanks Bob, Codehaus “was a thing”.