There are a reported nine million developers using Java with the programming language powering a reported 7 billion devices. It’s the most popular programming language, according to TIOBE Software’s monthly index, having switched places with C from a year ago.

Java 8 was introduced early last year, and with Java 9 on the horizon (it comes out in September), developers are showing strong support for the former. Java 8 has been considered the language’s biggest upgrade since its introduction in 1995, and has largely been regarded as the most important update in a decade.

“Java 8 is a revolutionary release of the world’s #1 development platform,” says Oracle. ” It includes a huge upgrade to the Java programming model and a coordinated evolution of the JVM, Java language, and libraries. Java 8 includes features for productivity, ease of use, improved polyglot programming, security and improved performance.”

eWeek has a nice four-page article about how developers are embracing Java 8, speaking to Oracle, which acquired Java creator Sun Microsoystems in 2009. Here’s a snippet from that:

“From all that we can tell, Java 8 is probably one of most rapidly adopted, if not the most rapidly adopted, major releases of Java,” Saab told eWEEK. “There’s a combination of things there. One thing is it hasn’t been that long since Java 7 came out so people were used to updating to a major release. The team put a lot of focus on compatibility and making sure the update from Java 6 to Java 7 was easy.”

Two-thirds of the respondents to a Typesafe survey from September 2014 said they were running Java 8 or had committed to switching within a year.

“It’s truly remarkable how quickly the Java developer community has rallied around Java 8,” said Jonas Boner, CTO and co-founder of Typesafe. “Innovation around Java and the JVM is transforming the modern data center infrastructure.”

Amazon recently added Java support to its Lambda cloud service, highlighting how widely used the language is today. In an announcement earlier this month, Amazon said:

We have had many requests for this and the team is thrilled to be able to respond. This is the first in a series of additional language options that we plan to make available to Lambda developers.

Your code can make use of Java 8 features (read What’s New in JDK 8) to learn more) along with any desired Java libraries. You can also use the AWS SDK for Java to make calls to the AWS APIs.

“Java remains a staple in business accounts, the types of customers that Amazon wants to win for its cloud and where it faces competition from Microsoft and its business-focused Azure cloud,” says Barb Darrow at Fortune. “Microsoft also wants to win over Java developers, supporting Java in Azure itself and adding Java support to its Microsoft Azure Service Fabric, a set of tools or platform that gives developers what they need to build scalable cloud services.”