News

Oracle Publishes Java EE 8 Community Survey Results

• By John K. Waters
• December 27, 2016

Oracle has published the results of its Java EE Community Survey, in which nearly 1,700 Java users worldwide ranked the importance of 21 component technologies in the company's revised Java EE Roadmap.

The survey was one of the first stops on that roadmap, which Anil Gaur, vice president of Oracle's Cloud Application Foundation group, unveiled at the annual JavaOne conference earlier this year.

The survey results were published in a report (PDF here) authored by the company's Java EE Development Team. The survey itself was conducted in September and October. Respondents were asked to rank components on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 equaling "not important," and 5 equaling "very important." The report ranks the technologies based on their average score on this scale. It also summarizes the team's conclusions based on these rankings.

Survey respondents named REST (JAX-RS 2.1) and HTTP/2 (Servlet 4.0) the two most important technologies in the survey, followed by OAuth and OpenID, Configuration, Eventing and JSON-B. Because much of the new API work in REST, HTTP/2 and JSON-B for Java EE 8 has been completed, the team noted, "There is significant value in delivering Java EE 8 with these technologies, and the related JSON-P updates, as soon as possible." JSON-P was ranked 14th in the survey.

Although they ranked high in the survey results, the authorization and identification capabilities of OAuth and OpenID won't be included in Java EE 8. "We considered accelerating Java EE standards for OAuth and OpenID Connect based on survey feedback," the team wrote. "This could not be accomplished in the Java EE 8 timeframe, but we'll continue to pursue Security 1.0 for Java EE 8."

Configuration and Health Checking, which Oracle proposed adding to Java EE 8 at JavaOne, also earned reasonably high rankings in the survey, but the Oracle team believes the scope of the work it would take to include them in the release would delay delivery. "We have concluded it is best to defer inclusion of these technologies in Java EE in order to complete Java EE 8 as soon as possible," they wrote.

Java EE Evangelist David Delabassee announced the publication of the survey results in a blog post on The Aquarium Web site. His post includes a chart summarizing the rankings of the component technologies surveyed. Although CDI 2.0, Bean Validation 2.0 and JSF 2.3 were not directly surveyed, Delabassee noted, enough progress has been made on those technologies to include them in Java EE 8.

In November, Oracle reacted to initial findings of the survey by announcing plans to withdraw the Java Specification Requests (JSRs) for the Java EE Management API 2.0 (JSR 373) and JMS 2.1 (JSR 368). Oracle also said that it would be investigating a possible transfer of the JSR for the Model-View-Controller (MVC 1.0) spec to another community member or organization to be completed as a standalone component.

The Oracle Java EE team said it would revise the Java EE 8 proposal to reflect the findings of this survey.