After weeks of speculation, Anil Gaur, Oracle Group Vice President with responsibility for Java EE and WebLogic Server, has unveiled Oracle’s proposed roadmap for Java EE today at JavaOne. The plan is to release Java EE 8 by the end of 2017 with basic microservice and cloud capabilities, and then to release Java EE 9 one year later with further features.

Consistent with his appearance at the JCP Executive Committee a month ago, as well as during an interview with Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle, Gaur’s presentation at the Java Keynote at JavaOne revolved around three basic principles: Java EE as the place to standardise innovation in the Enterprise Java space, changes that Oracle may have for Java EE needing to be executed through and with the community, and Oracle believing in and wanting to be part of the future of Java EE.

Regarding new features, Gaur indicated that while new application development styles like reactive programming or containerisation can provide great benefits, they can also prove challenging for the average developer. For this reason, he emphasised that Oracle’s strategy for Java EE is to expand its functionality to standardise these practices, saving the developer from having to evaluate different competing solutions out there. More precisely, Gaur proposed that Java EE 8 is extended with enhanced Security (in the form of secret management and support for OAuth and/or OpenID), an API for self-contained configuration, and also another one for health checks (potentially supporting application monitoring), with the aim of having all this ready by the end of 2017. He then extended to a proposed architecture, potentially available with Java EE 9 at the end of 2018, that would include other features like Eventual Consistency or Key-Value storage, to name a couple.



Anil Gaur presenting the proposed architecture for Java EE.

Despite the relevance of the announcement, Gaur highlighted that Oracle is determined to work with the community to effect all of these changes, beginning with a public survey to understand how people create, configure, manage and package their applications. Finally, to showcase how relevant Java EE still is to the industry, Gaur showed a number of active Open Source projects that are based on Java EE (including the MicroProfile), and invited eight different organisations, in fields ranging from research (CERN) to finance (Nykredit) to speak about how they currently use Java EE and how they would like to use it in the future.

Given the past pace of development, it may seem a bit unlikely that Oracle will manage to release two new versions of Java EE within the next 30 months, however, the message seems to be that Java EE is going to receive much more attention from now on. Once the JSRs for all the new features are created and work on them begins, we will be able to evaluate the degree to which these plans will materialise.