The long delayed Java 9 isn't going to make its July release date. The latest delay is to give the Java Expert Group time to get Project Jigsaw back into the mix.

The latest proposal is that Java 9 Standard Edition will be released on September 21. According to Oracle's Mark Reinhold, the delay is needed to accommodate the additional time required for the JCP Executive Committee (EC) to work through their concerns about including the Java Platform Module System. You might think that given how long Java 9 has been delayed, they'd have got everything sorted by now, but apparently not.

As we explained in May, the JCP Executive committee rejected the inclusion of Project Jigsaw and therefore modules as being too disruptive for developers. The main voters against the inclusion (Red Hat and IBM) either have or back alternative module systems.

Explaining its decision to vote against the inclusion, RedHat said in an open letter that:

The Jigsaw implementation is a new module system which is has worked successfully for modularising Java itself, but is largely untried in wider production deployments of any real applications on top of the JVM.  Many application deployment use cases which are widely implemented today are not possible under Jigsaw, or would require a significant re-architecture.

Project Jigsaw, concerned with making Java modular, was originally planned to be part of Java 7 but was bumped to Java 8, then in 2012 it was again dropped till Java 9. Jigsaw aims to be usable by the average Java programmer and not just the specialist. It is also designed be used by the JDK itself, making Java modular from the inside out.

Since voting against the inclusion of Jigsaw, the expert group has apparently 'come to an agreement' about the modularity concerns.

Writing about the current situation on the OpenJDK mailing list, Mark Reinhold said the vote didn't mean Jigsaw was dropped. Instead:

"It only means that the EC raised a number of concerns that it wanted the JSR 376 Expert Group (EG) to address."

Following a number of conference calls over recent weeks, the conclusion was that the specification of the module system's resolution algorithm should be 'clarified', and one five-line method was added to the module-system API. Reinhold says that these changes:

"together with additional clarifications to the JSR 376 and JSR 379 (Java SE 9) Specifications, will hopefully address the EC's concerns."

However, until those clarifications and changes are complete, the actual final date isn't clear, so Reinhold proposed to that work continues to produce an initial Release Candidate build on 22 June, but that the groups adjusts:

"the GA date in order to accommodate the additional time required to move through the JCP process. To be specific, I propose that we move the GA date out by eight weeks, from 27 July to 21 September." 

Will this be the last time you read about Java 9 being delayed? Hopefully, but who knows.

More Information

Open JDK GA Change Date Proposal

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