Wednesday, March 02, 2011

JDK 7 preview and JEE 7 planning

We got two interesting developments in Java land this week:

1. Oracle released the developer preview of the Java 7 Development Kit (JDK)

2. Oracle have started talking publically about what JEE 7 (and beyond - JEE 8) will look like in Q3 2012 and Q4 2013.

(1) has been a long time coming and it's good to see the log jam moving. Simply shipping JDK 7 is good in its own right but it also means that the team will move onto working on JDK 8, which contains some key language features omitted from JDK 7 so that the team could JGIOTFD (Just Get It Out The (reader exercise to complete the acronym)).

(2) looks to be Oracle really making the JEE stack cloud-based / cloud-friendly by default rather than a technology stack that merely facilitates cloud computing. This dynamic should see Oracle formalising exactly what constitutes "JEE in the cloud" via a JSR and thus wresting that intellectual responsibility back from Google's App Engine platform, which is pretty much the de facto standard for "JEE in the cloud" at present.

Looking beyond JEE 7, JEE 8 looks to be embracing Big Data / NoSQL systems like Hadoop and Cassandra, although we can expect to have seen significant consolidation in this space by 2013, making the integration and platform support task easier to accomplish.

All in all, two nice moves, and good news for the Java eco system / economy. You might or might not like Oracle, but they are getting stuff out the door in a way that Sun kind of forgot how to do.

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