Oracle to scale back features for JDK 7

By Alex Handy

September 21, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
Oracle is going with Plan B for JDK 7.

Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle, took the stage at Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne on Monday night to remove the uncertainty that has surrounded the Java platform since Oracle closed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

“I've been at JavaOne since 1997,” said Kurian, “but this year is very special for us because it is the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving.”

Plan B calls for the elimination of projects Coin, Jigsaw and Lambda from the JDK 7 release train. This will push forward the completion date of JDK 7 to some time in 2011, and allow the Oracle team to push for JDK 8 in 2012.

Those three lost features will be pushed into JDK 8, according to Mark Reinhold, Oracle’s lead developer for JDK 7. Project Jigsaw is an effort to make Java more modular, while Project Lambda aims to bring closures to Java, and Project Coin is an effort to make small changes to Java's behavior and syntax. All three projects are underway, but Reinhold intimated on his blog that including them in JDK 7 would push the release of that project back until 2012.

While JDK 7 is moving toward completion in the middle of next year, a JSR will be constructed alongside it and passed through the JCP at the same time. Reinhold wrote on his blog that the JCP will approve a specification for JDK 7 at the same time as the release of the final version of the platform; this is the traditional way new versions of Java have been advanced.

For the past year, the JCP has remained stagnant. Even Rod Johnson, a member of the JCP executive committee, has hinted that the body might be dying. But while Oracle has been quiet on the topic of the JCP until now, the announcement that JDK 7 would have an umbrella JSR issued and worked through the JCP indicates that Oracle intends to keep the community body alive.

Related Search Term(s): Java, Oracle

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Comments

10/31/2010 05:22:52 AM EST

At least Oracle knows how to ignore unnecessary language changes (closures and coin) and hopefully focus on getting the bugs out, hopefully improving swing, possibly focusing on multicore performance. Most Java programmers are newbies who have no (bloody f*****g) idea. Endlessly prating about meaningless features, silly scripting languages, what is this junk? BPML? JSP? JSF? Groovy? Ruby? Dead or soon-to-be dead junk. The ever accelerating pace of the transition from hype-to-junk.

United Stateskevinb