When we announced the Java EE 7 JSR back in early 2011, our plans were
that we would release it by Q4 2012. While this target date was three
years after the release of Java EE 6 and certainly later than we would
have liked, at the time it seemed like an aggressive schedule given
the proposed scope of the release. We have since adjusted this date
once (to the spring of 2013) in order to accommodate the inclusion of
additional JSRs of importance to the community (in particular, Web
Sockets and JSON-P).
As you know, our focus in the Java EE 7 release has been three-fold:
to continue to invest in significant enhancements in simplification,
usability, and functionality in updated versions of the JSRs that are
currently part of the platform; to introduce new JSRs that reflect
emerging needs in the community; and to add support for use in cloud
environments.
At this stage of the process, I think it is safe to say that
maintaining the entirety of this agenda -- particularly the aspects
related to PaaS enablement and multitenancy support -- puts our
proposed dates at very significant risk. We estimate that
realistically we would not be ready with a release of Java EE 7
until the spring of 2014. In our opinion, that is way too long.
After considerable soul-searching as to the causes of this delay --
limited industry experience in the cloud area when we started this
work, together with a lack of maturity in the space for provisioning,
multi-tenancy, elasticity, and the deployment of applications in the
cloud -- we are proposing that we defer to Java EE 8 the areas of PaaS
enablement and multitenancy support.
Of course, we continue to believe that Java EE is well-suited for use
in the cloud, although such use might not be quite ready for full
standardization. Even today, without Java EE 7, vendors such as
Oracle, Red Hat, IBM, and CloudBees have begun to offer the ability to
run Java EE applications in the cloud.
Postponing the remainder of the work on cloud support until Java EE 8
will therefore also have the important advantage of enabling Java EE
vendors to gain more experience with implementations in this area, and
will thus help us avoid risks entailed by trying to standardize in an
area that is arguably still some time away from being mature.
It is important to note that the features that we have already added
to Java EE 7 for cloud support -- such as resource definition
metadata, improved security configuration, JPA schema generation --
serve as enhancements to the Java EE 7 programming model in non-cloud
environments as well. The inclusion of these features in Java EE 7
will help expedite a cloud-oriented release of Java EE 8 in the
future.
We plan to target this Java EE 8 release for the spring of 2015. We
expect to include new JSRs for application configuration, for
JSON binding support, and others, which we hope to launch in advance
of the completion of Java EE 7.
This shift in the scope of Java EE 7 also allows us to better retain
our focus on enhancements in simplification and usability and to
deliver on schedule those features that have been most requested by
developers. These include the support for HTML 5 in the form of Web
Sockets and JSON-P; the simplified JMS APIs; improved Managed Bean
alignment, including transactional interceptors; the JAX-RS client
API; support for method-level validation; a much more comprehensive
expression language; and more.
To conclude, what we are proposing is to hold to the current dates for
Java EE 7 (spring of next year); maintain the focus on all of the
feature enhancements targeted at simplification and usability; retain
the cloud-related features we have already defined; and defer the
remaining portions of the cloud-oriented work to Java EE 8.
We feel strongly that this is the right thing to do, in view of what
we and our team have heard from members of the community.
Please let us know if you have any major concerns with this proposed
direction.
thanks!
-Linda