I’ve been following the Java™ 8 work by the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) team for a while now. Naturally, they’re tracking all of the work through our Bugzilla instance.

All Java 8 bugs are prefixed with “[1.8]”, which makes them pretty easy to find. My Mylyn query shows me that with 589 bugs closed, the team has around 75% of the bugs fixed. Of course, new bugs are still coming in, but that is an impressive metric none-the-less.

If we think of Bug 380106 as the first Java 8 bug, then it follows that development on Java 8 began on May 21/2012.

Since that date, JDT Git repositories have recorded 2,806 commits authored by seventy-eight (78) different contributors (authors, not necessarily committers). That number of contributors is staggering. And these contributors come from a pretty diverse set of organizations. Many are independent.

Officially, the JDT project and its subprojects (Core, Debug, UI) have a total of 24 committers. If we assume that all of these committers have been active in this period (which isn’t true), that’s an impressive 2/3 of all contributors who come from outside of the project. While this number doesn’t help us understand how prolific the contributors are (I’ll work out a query for that), I think that it does tell us that JDT and its subprojects are doing a very good job of operating in an open manner.

Of those 2,806 commits, 795 are easily attributed to Java 8 development (i.e. they have “[1.8]”) in their comment. By “eyeballing” some of the comments, that number is obviously very low. I’ll have see what I can do to refine that query to not depend solely on that particular string. Those 795 commits are attributed to twenty-two (22) contributors.

Probably the easiest way to keep pace with ongoing development is to listen in on the Bugzilla discussions.

Log into Bugzilla Navigate to “Email Preferences” Scroll down to “User Watching” Add the following email addresses (or some subset) to the “watch list”: jdt-apt-inbox@eclipse.org

jdt-core-inbox@eclipse.org

jdt-debug-inbox@eclipse.org

jdt-doc-inbox@eclipse.org

jdt-text-inbox@eclipse.org

jdt-ui-inbox@eclipse.org

By almost any standard that I can think of, the JDT project is very active, diverse, open, and transparent.