Java developers are going to have to wait a bit longer for JDK 9 - four months longer, in fact. If you're thinking that this sounds familiar, that's because Oracle has already moved the release date from this month to next March. The new delay will take the release date through to sometime in July 2017.  

The news of the delay came on the Java developers mailing list where Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Plaform Group at Oracle, posted an update announcing that while a lot of progress has been made on the main new feature, Project Jigsaw:

"at this point it's clear that Jigsaw needs more time."

Project Jigsaw is intended to offer a way for Java programmers to write code consisting of independent modules. Jigsaw will define a standard module system for the Java platform and that will be used to modularize the platform itself and applications. Jigsaw, along with Lamda and Coin, was originally intended to be in Java 7 and all three of these were held over to be in Java 8. Jigsaw missed Java 8 and is obviously still holding up JDK 9.

Discussing Jigsaw, Reinhold said on the mailing list:

"We recently received critical feedback that motivated a redesign of the module system's package-export feature, without which we'd have failed to achieve one of our main goals. There are, beyond that, still many open design issues, which will take time to work through."

 Adding weight to the need for a delay, he also said that:

“the number of open bugs that are new in JDK 9 is quite a bit larger than it was at this point in JDK 8.”

In view of this, the suggestion is that the release will be delayed for another four months. On the whole, the developers on the mailing list were in favor of the delay; no-one wants JDK 9 to arrive without a working Project Jigsaw.

More Information

JDK Mailing List

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