Oracle has announced plans for Java SE and EE at JavaOne that will see improvements and changes to the licensing. 

Oracle had already announced it would be moving Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, and the announcements at JavaOne move the language further to a more vendor-neutral future. It's worth noting that the keynote was preceded by a Safe Harbor disclaimer in which Oracle said it could not be held to plans made during the speech, so nothing is actually certain.

According to the keynote, Oracle isn't washing its hands of Java. Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development for the Java platform at Oracle, said that  Java is currently the number one language, with 12 million developers, 38 billion active virtual machines, and 21 billion cloud-connected virtual machines. However, Mark Cavage, Vice President of software development at Oracle, said that what has to happen is for Java to become even stronger:

"We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always."

He said that in order for this to happen, Java has to be improved, saying that while Java EE 8 offers HTTP/2 support, async APIs, and reactive APIs, it's not good enough:

"We need to do a lot more to modernise; to get you to that world of cloud and microservices and serverless."

The things that are wrong with the current setup, according to Cavage, are pretty self evident:

" Is it open? No, it’s a vendor consortium, last time I checked those aren’t that open. Is it nimble? Well is shipped four years ago, that’s not very fast. We’re going to change everything about this."

The first part of getting things done more quickly, according to Cavage, is to open up Java EE and move it under the control of the Eclipse Foundation. This had already been announced, but what was new was a plan to open up the Oracle JDK version of OpenJDK. Currently, Oracle JDK has features not in the open version, but this will change:

"We're going to open source all the features in the Oracle JDK. There will be zero difference."

Currently, Oracle JDK includes Oracle’s own implementation of features including Java WebStart and Java Plugin, along with OpenJDK Font Renderer, Java Flight Recorder and Java Mission Control. These are used to collect low level and detailed runtime information. Java Flight Recorder is a profiling and event collection framework built into the Oracle JDK. It can be used to gather detailed low level information about how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Java application are behaving. Java Mission Control is a set of tools for analysis of the data collected by Java Flight Recorder.

You can see the full keynote in the video below:

Open JDK will be available under a GPL license, and Java SE is to move to having new releases every six months.

More Information

JavaOne Website

Related Articles

Java EE Moving To Eclipse

Java EE To Get Open Source Foundation

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