I'm feeling nostalgic. Anyone who has developed something for the internet in the early 2000s for sure have downloaded something from Apache website (e.g. Apache httpd which most people simply call "Apache", and Tomcat). Many products in the Attic were born during the golden age of Java.
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Because I used Java extensively around 2001, then not till 2020, I paid no attention in the interim. It seems like it had an early golden age, then a middle ages in which horrors like Spring were born to compensate for the stagnation, and is enjoying a resurgence or renaissance now with Scala / Clojure / Kotlin / Java16 ?
I worked with Java from 2009 until now. I can't account for the 01-09 timespan, but I'd say the big gap between say java 1.5 and 1.8 was less about stagnation and more about letting other languages feel things out. I like that Java is never too far ahead or too far behind.
I do think the "hip" side of tech has started to warm back up to Java, both as the language adopts some of the niceties that python/ruby/kotlin/scala/etc have shown are quite ergonomic and also as the community, I think, warms back up to the idea that static typing can be net helpful and that maybe a good JIT compiler is nice too.
That's some solid historical revisionism is action here :-)
That period you mention was definitely due to stagnation, on Sun's part. It wasn't "watch the pioneers as the crash and burn and pick the good parts". It was "we're stuck".
That's probably fair. I was in high school during that period. I've mostly only ever known the Java owned by Oracle, where it seemed... reasonably kept? Java 8 happened under Oracle, after all.