JDK 9 release delayed another four months Oracle's asking for more time to complete JDK 9. The chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, took to the Java developer's mailing list to say that while work on JDK 9 is coming along nicely “We are not, unfortunately, where we need to be relative to the current schedule.” The hard part of JDK 9 is “ …
I've been wondering for some while whether Oracle's senior management are really serious about Java any more. It is clear that it brought Sun Microsystems in the belief that it could try to convert some of Sun's technology (principally Java) it hard cash; this however pretty much shot down when the courts ruled against them in Oracle vs Google. Of course this is not the final curtain call on that saga - expect it to be dragged out in ever-higher courts for the next few years, but IMO the auguries do not look good for Oracle.
I have also seen a lot of comments that Oracle has been starving the Java development team of resources (e.g. staff, project funding, coffee, ...), which would be consistent with them loosing interest (as a consequence of not being able to use it to boost the bottom line).
It wouldn't really surprise me if the development of Java stalls once Java 9 is released (assuming that that event ever happens - seems we are seeing Xeno's paradox applied to project management here). The question will be - will Oracle allow Java to be taken over as an open source project, or will they strangle it in a fit of pique?
Java is already open source so conceivably it could fork whenever it felt like. But Oracle hold the copyrights and probably certain patents so it'd have to be renamed as something else. It's not the first opensource that has walked from Oracle stewardship. Hudson became Jenkins, MySQL became MariaDB and of course OpenOffice became LibreOffice.
Of course companies that use Java tend to be highly conservative and even if it was forked it doesn't mean it would succeed. They'd probably stick with what they had for the support, certification and so on. It's probably that conservatism which explains the slow pace of Java development in the first place.
While I dislike Oracle's business practices and there are plenty of other companies I'd have preferred overseeing Java. I'm pretty sure they are committed to java, they depend on it significant, this to me is one of the reasons they wanted ownership of Java. Sure if they can monetise it they will but the fact so much of their business depends on it makes it much more valuable.
We've been waiting for jigsaw for a long time, a few more months is nothing, especially if it means it's going to be done right and not bodged to get it out the door.
Define serious.
Oracle have a lot of Java dependent software.
Its certainly useful for them and they'd not like to see it go elsewhere.
Are Oracle serious in the 'spending money' on it way? Dont know.
java is relatively mature now. I dont see the JVM or language attracting much in the way of new features. Id guess the whole sue Google has put offer Google investing much in Dalvik.
One thing Java is *terrible* for is running on cloudy platforms. Java gets its performance by throwing memory at the JVM. Memory hungry/mallocing apps running on VM are shit. Java is memory hungery therefore Jave based apps are shit on the VMs.
I was just going to say how can anyone think oracle is not serious about java when so much of their own software runs on it.
Yeah i read the stories earlier this year ahout them trying to be more proprietary and then changing course but regardless unless they are re writing their apps in another language java isn't going anywhere.
The trend seems to be to mix a high level scripting language with a low level language.
For very small values of "trend". There are currently 6 out of 14,500 jobs on JobServe.com that require Lua.
Seriously, the world that Java (and COBOL) development mostly serves is more interested in consistency than the latest whizzo idea.
Java has already attempted to blend high and low level coding designs. Java 8 added lambdas, processing streams, and more modern concurrency. It's hit and miss. It provides a clean framework for efficiently performing complex operations while at the same time making it much easier to write the lazy bloated crap that gives Java a bad reputation. Honestly, I'd let the Java world spend more time figuring out how this concept should work before throwing together another half-assed language.
The reference platform of Java is now the open source implementation, which means that they must push it, or at the very least follow suit. IBM are also a threat, when it comes to Java.
Of course, as others have noted, a lot of their as well as their rival's software runs on Java, NetWeaver anybody ?
As for Java requiring more memory, I am not quite sure that is more of a problem compared to c++ or .Not these days, besides, memory is cheap. If you look at the apps today, they require insane amounts of RAM ... who da thunk that a svchost -netsvc would require over 100Mb of RAM ??? Or a browser using a 1Gb of RAM, happens quite frequently to me, ok, I have plenty of bugzilla tabs open ... where are the days where a dev would optimize his code for reasonable memory usage ?
" where are the days where a dev would optimize his code for reasonable memory usage ?" For most common applications being memory frugal is not valuable for the time it takes to tweak the code. What is more valuable is programmers' time both to initially write the code and to maintain it. So code that is easier to understand and follow wins out over highly optimized code. If this means a few extra megs of ram it probably will not be noticed by most users.
Also, remember the mantra the cheapest upgrade to a computer is to add more memory particularly to a desktop.
Is not that a problem specific to Java, its a problem that occurs when you're deploying a heap hammering application to a cloud. Each VM goes through an MMU mapping, which goes through a physcial MMU mapping. It all adds up.
More and more stuff is being run on VMs/clouds. Memory hogging apps really perform badly.
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