JDK 9 is Feature Complete
Tuesday, 31 January 2017

 JDK 9 is now feature complete, and the general availability date for Java 9 Standard Edition has been announced as July 27th 2017. 

Details of the latest progress were announced by Oracle's Mark Reinhold to the JDK developer mailing list. Reinhold says that Oracle achieved the Feature Extension Complete milestone in late December, and that all JEPs and small enhancements granted extensions have been integrated into the JDK 9 master forest.

The developers are now in the rampdown process, in which the aim is to:

"fix the bugs that need to be fixed and understand why we're not going to fix some bugs that perhaps ought to be fixed."

The news means that the overall feature set that has been announced is what will be in the final release, as it is highly unlikely that any further JEPs will be targeted to the release.

The headline improvement to JDK 9 is, of course, Project Jigsaw, which provides the means for developers to write code consisting of independent modules. Jigsaw defines a standard module system for the Java platform and that will be used to modularize the platform itself and applications.

The JDK 9 page on the Open JDK site lists a number of features related to Project Jigsaw as being included in JDK 9, including the modular JDK  and the implementation of the Java Platform Module System, so Jigsaw is finally here.

Anything else is going to be very much secondary, but other highlights include API updates,better tooling, and an HTTP/2 client system.

The API updates improve the limited support in Java SE for native operating-system processes. It provides a basic API to setup the environment and start a process, and that's pretty much it. Now the java.lang.Process class has been enhanced to provide the operating specific process id of the process, information about the process including the arguments, the command, the start time of the process, the accumulated cpu time of the process and the user name for the process.

The new HTTP 2 Client API replaces the problematic existing HTTP client API with a new version that supports HTTP/2 protocol and WebSocket features.

The tooling improvement comes partially from the addition of a new tool called jshell. This is an interactive tool to evaluate declarations, statements, and expressions of the Java programming language, together with an API so that other applications can use this functionality.

Other features making life easier for developers include variable handles and more concurrency updates. Variable handles standardize the way you invoke the equivalents of various java.util.concurrent.atomic and sun.misc.Unsafe operations on object fields and array elements.

openjdk

More Information

Mark Reinhold On JDK Mailing List 

 OpenJDK Site

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Java 8 Launched With Supporting Line-Up

 

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