Java 8 won't be modular
July 19, 2012 —
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Mark Reinhold is a busy man. As chief architect of the Java platform group, he's been busily directing the course of the language and platform for over five years now. By the time Oracle OpenWorld opens in September, he and his team are expected to have completed work on OpenJDK 8. But on July 17, he announced that Java 8 would not be modular, thanks to a decision to leave Project Jigsaw out of this release.
Project Jigsaw is a long-running attempt to turn Java into a modular platform, where pieces can be selected and used. Currently, the Java platform requires a lot of additional software and libraries beyond what is needed to run a simple POJO (plain old Java object). Instead, Java has remained a fairly large platform to work with, by modern standards. Languages like Python and Ruby aren't nearly as restrictive in their environment requirements, and can both be installed in pieces according to what’s needed.
And this was the goal of Project Jigsaw. Originally scheduled for Java SE 6, Jigsaw was pushed back to OpenJDK 7, but schedules did not allow for the project to be completed for that release either. Reinhold, in a blog post, {http://mreinhold.org/blog/late-for-the-train} wrote that Jigsaw is a massive undertaking, requiring a complete re-architecting of Java, and that expecting this work to be done by the end of the summer was unreasonable.
Wrote Reinhold, “Modularizing the Java SE Platform and the JDK while maintaining compatibility for existing code is an incredibly delicate task which requires careful changes throughout both the specification and the implementation. We have, moreover, yet to design and prototype an approach to supporting containers such as IDEs, Java EE application servers, and applet containers, all of which require some amount of reflective dynamism. We’re reasonably confident that we can work through these issues, but doing so will most likely take us past May 2013.”
Commenters on Reinhold's blog ranged from irate to excited. Generally, the discussions around this change focused on the merits of frequent releases versus the need for Java to shed some weight. One commenter lamented the constant pushing back of the project, while others praised Reinhold for not sacrificing the now-yearly release schedule.
Related Search Term(s): Java, OpenJDK, Project Jigsaw
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