Moving Java Forward Faster by Mark Reinhold

The Java SE Platform and the JDK are moving to a rapid, six-month release cadence, with the next release in March 2018. We’ll review the motivations for this change and discuss some of its consequences. We'll then take a look ahead at the pipeline of features currently in development in various projects in the OpenJDK Community including Amber, Panama, Valhalla, and Loom.

Mark Reinhold, Oracle
Mark Reinhold is Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle. His past contributions to the platform include character-stream readers and writers, reference objects, shutdown hooks, the NIO high-performance I/O APIs, library generification, service loaders, and the Jigsaw module system. Mark has held key leadership roles in every Java SE and JDK release since version 1.2, in 1998. He currently leads the JDK Project in the OpenJDK Community, where he also serves on the Governing Board. Mark holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Recorded at Jfokus 2018

[nO_dNAL]

I'm so glad Oracle is open-sourcing JMC and JFR, and speeding up major releases. I wonder why they didn't do this earlier?

[tukkek]

Oracle is being very selective when it comes to sharing their plans for Java. Version 11 was just released today with license change and some incomprehensible decisions such as dropping open-source builds and the auto-update feature, without as much as explaining it all. Half of the JEPs are "not public" and we're left wondering what will happen to Java with no clues to actually base ourselves on. For people who have their careers and projects riding on this technology, this is very worrisome!

On the other hand, they're doing a great job picking up development pace and modernizing the language - and when it comes to that, they're glad to tell us everything, even with years of advance!

Oracle: why can't we have nice things? You definitely have an end-goal in mind with some of the changes that seem random to us passersby. The fact you're keeping that private and throwing big surprises at us with each new release is baffling and we can only assume you're not sharing because we wouldn't like to hear what you'd have to say. Why should I stick with Java in 2018 and onwards if you don't treat users as first-class citizens when it comes to sharing long-term goals? Maybe I'd do well to jump ship early instead?