News

Oracle Pushes Java EE 8 Release Date

• By John K. Waters
• June 8, 2015

Oracle Corp. has pushed the target release date of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 8 (Java EE 8) to the first half of 2017. Updates of the target dates for the Java Specification Requests (JSRs) "under the Java EE umbrella" reflecting this change are forthcoming, the company said.

John Clingan, product manager for Java EE and GlassFish Server at Oracle, made the announcement on "The Aquarium" blog. Referring to the strategy keynote at JavaOne 2014, in which some presenters may have raised the community's expectations, he wrote:

"The goal that we set for ourselves then was to complete this work by JavaOne San Francisco 2016. Although we all like to do (and hear) big things at JavaOne, the various latencies involved in launching expert groups, as well as the other demands on the time of our spec leads, has resulted in the date being pushed out a bit."

Oracle made the announcement, Clingan wrote, because it is "strongly committed to transparency in our work on the Java EE Platform."

The JSR to develop Java EE 8 was approved last September by the Java Community Process (JCP). Cameron Purdy, vice president of Oracle's Cloud Application Foundation and Java EE group, said at the time that Oracle is making "a very conscious investment both in the components that make up the enterprise architecture for Java, and the wholeness of the specification itself." Purdy added: "What I mean by that is that most of the specs that go into Java EE are, by themselves, extremely valuable."

The main focus of Java EE 8 is support for HTML5 and the emerging HTTP 2.0 standard, Purdy said, as well as enhanced simplification, managed bean integration, and improved infrastructure for applications running in the cloud. Support for HTML 5 apps actually showed up in Java EE 7 with the Java API for WebSocket, the JSON Processing API, and Servlet NIO. With Java EE 8, Oracle plans to augment support for HTML5 apps by adding support for server-sent events, standardized binding between JSON text and Java objects, and improvements to the Java API for WebSocket and the Java API for JSON Processing.

In his announcement, Clingan added that pushing the release target date back has an upside: more time for the community to participate in the process. "We continue to encourage developers to track JSRs and provide feedback by viewing the individual JSR mailing lists, wikis, and download and try out early Java EE 8 reference implementation builds," he wrote. He also praised the interest and participation of the ever expanding Java User Group (JUG) ecosystem, and singled out CJUG and Morocco JUG, both of whom are participating in the Adopt-a-JSR program, adopting JSR 366.