The Ingredients and Roadmap of Rebooted Java EE 8 and 9

After one year vacations Java EE 8 was rebooted and is going to be optimised to run on hypervisors and / or container environments. Java EE 8 will focus on the following areas below -- it is a proposal and very likely to change in the JCP process:

1. Extend for reactive programming
2. Unified event model
3. Event messaging API
4. JAX-RS, HTTP/2, Lambda, JSON-B, (...)

1. Package applications, runtimes into services
2. Standalone immutable executable binary
3. Multi-artifact archives

1. Persistence and query interface for key value and document DB

1. Automatically event out changes to observed data structures

1. New spec - interfaces, packaging format, manifest
2. Ephemeral instantiation

1. Externalize configuration
2. Unified API for accessing configuration

1. Increased density
2. Tenant-aware routing and deployment

1. API to store externalized state

1. Extension to support client-side circuit breakers
2. Resilient commands
3. Standardize on client-side format for reporting health

1. Secret management
2. OAuth
3. OpenID

The choices are pragmatic and will make Java EE an even more productive platform. I'm only missing a slightly extended and modernized "Concurrency Utilities for Java EE" (jcp.org/ja/jsr/detail?id=236). Particularly the ThreadPool configuration and Backpressure could be easily standardized just by agreeing on features from https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ThreadPoolExecutor.html. Particularly useful would be the integration of the statistics (e.g. Bulkheads) with the Health Check API.

Also a standardized management API (not proposed) would simplify the creation of application images through a unified API.

Java EE 8 and 9 will come at light speed to an application server vendor near you. Java EE 8 is expected to be delivered in 2017 and Java EE 9 in 2018.

Oracle is listening now, take the chance and participate at the survey (takes a few mins): glassfish.org/survey

See you at Java EE Workshops at Munich Airport, Terminal 2 or Virtual Dedicated Workshops / consulting. Is Munich's airport too far? Learn from home: airhacks.io.