There may finally be some light at the end of the long tunnel for Java EE 8. Oracle recently updated the Java community on Java EE 8, which included the latest release schedule and updates on JSR activities. Almost four years in the making, the road…
There may finally be some light at the end of the long tunnel for Java EE 8. Oracle’s recent blog post updated the Java community on Java EE 8 activities, which included the latest release schedule:
A February 21, 2017 e-mail from Java EE spec lead, Linda DeMichiel , to the JSR 366 (Java EE 8) experts outlined how the spec leads are following aggressive schedules to complete the JSRs targeted to the final Java EE 8 release:
The MVC 1.0 specification ( JSR 371 ) leadership was recently transferred away from Oracle, and will not be included in Java EE 8.
In an e-mail to DeMichiel, Kevin Sutter , Java EE architect at IBM, questioned how the Servlet 4.0 requirement for ALPN (Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation, a TLS extension that includes the protocol negotiation within the exchange of hello messages, to be included in Java SE 9) will be resolved. DeMichiel replied:
I know there’s been talk about backporting this support to Java SE 8 (or, at least, the required APIs), but I still haven’t seen anything official. We have to do *something* here — the specs are currently broken as currently laid out.
The road to Java EE 8 has not been easy. Much has been written regarding Oracle’s commitment to Java EE 8 over the past year. Shortly after the release of Java EE 7 in 2013, Oracle expressed enthusiasm in planning for Java EE 8. The theme at JavaOne 2013 was dubbed, “Make the Future of Java.” In their November 2013 blog post , Oracle stated:
After the launch of Java EE 7 and GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, we began planning the Java EE 8 roadmap, which was covered during the JavaOne Strategy Keynote. To summarize, there is a lot of interest in improving on HTML5 support, Cloud, and investigating NoSQL support. We received a lot of great feedback from the community and customers on what they would like to see in Java EE 8.
To summarize, Oracle is committed to the future of Java EE. Java EE 7 has been released and planning for Java EE 8 has begun.
In the same blog post, Oracle also announced a major change with regards to commercial support for Oracle GlassFish Server:
Oracle will no longer release future major releases of Oracle GlassFish Server with commercial support – specifically Oracle GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support will not be released.
Oracle recommends that existing commercial Oracle GlassFish Server customers begin planning to move to Oracle WebLogic Server, which is a natural technical and license migration path forward:
Support for GlassFish Server Open Source , however, will continue.
In September 2014, the newly formed Java EE 8 Specification ( JSR 366 ) proposed their original release schedule:
Since then, however, Oracle’s enthusiasm seemed to have waned. In their June 2015 blog post , Oracle updated the Java community:
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. We are strongly committed to transparency in our work on the Java EE Platform. We are therefore publicly announcing that we are now changing our target time frame for the completion of this work to the first half of 2017.
This delay inspired former Oracle evangelist, Reza Rahman to form a community organization known as the Java EE Guardians with the aim of getting things back on track. As InfoQ reported in June 2016:
In the wake of last year’s downsizing in Oracle’s Java evangelism, as well as their earlier announcement that they would be suspending future major releases of GlassFish server and limiting support, a group of Java standard bearers calling themselves the Java EE Guardians formulated a charter declaring their intent to come to the rescue of Java EE.
