Technical Article => Programming => Java

The original Java 9 planned release date is March 2017. But latest source shows that Java 9 release will be delayed again to July 2017. It's four months later than the planned date.

Oracle Chief Architect of Java Platform group Mark Reinhold proposes this new release date in a message sent on the OpenJDK mailing list.

Despite this progress, at this point it's clear that Jigsaw needs more time. We recently received critical feedback that motivated a redesign of the module system's package-export feature [5], without which we'd have failed to achieve one of our main goals. There are, beyond that, still many open design issues [6], which will take time to work through. Looking at the release as a whole, 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. The maintainers of many popular projects are now actively testing against the JDK 9 EA builds [7], but we'd like to see even more in order to be confident that potential issues have been found and reported. For these reasons I hereby propose a four-month extension of the JDK 9 schedule, moving the General Availability (GA) milestone to July 2017.

Mark Reinhold says there are lots of feedback from the users and developers on Jigsaw, the biggest feature introduced in Java 9, after the early releases are available. The Java group is considering to rework the Package-Export feature. And there are other design issues to be tackled as well.

Apart from this, there are many security related bugs to be fixed and the number of open bugs in current Java 9 is far more than the number in Java 8. It will take time to fix all of them.

As planned, there will be many new features introduced in Java 9, including a brand new console tool for running Java statements -- JShell. Users may need to wait four more months to use these new features.