Oracle has outlined its future plans for Java SE, EE and JavaFX at the JavaOne conference, currently taking place in San Francisco. With the deferral of modularisation from Java SE 8, due in late 2013, there is a distinct lack of new developments that will be arriving in the next 12 months. Oracle did take the opportunity to re-announce the now-official Sumatra GPU acceleration project, and the Avatar UI project, announced at last year's JavaOne.

Over the year though, Java SE 8 will see the addition of lambda expressions (closures), a new JavaScript engine (Nashorn), new date and time APIs, JSR 308's Java type annotations and an easier to tune Hotspot VM. It should also see more, if not all, of the converged virtual machine appearing from the merging of the HotSpot JVM and JRockit JVM. Preview builds of JDK 8 are available from jdk8.java.net.

Java EE 7 is due to arrive in April 2013 and will bring with it a WebSocket API, the JCACHE API, Batch application and a JSON API. Oracle will be offering Glassfish 4.0 as the reference platform for Java EE 7 in both an open source and commercial edition. What will be missing from Java EE 7 is multi-tenancy and platform-as-a-service support; this was dropped in August to ensure that Java EE 7 would arrive in Spring 2013.

Oracle's standardisation plans for JavaFX 2.0, which will be updated to JavaFX 8 when JDK 8 arrives, are currently set to occur in the Java SE 9 time frame. Oracle is making JavaFX 8 the default UI toolkit for Java SE 8 Embedded and says that it will be adding a new API for UI control creators, more HTML5 tag support in the WebView, better 3D support, bi-directional language support and JavaFX Scene Builder 2.0, to the new version. Additionally, version 1.1 of Scene Builder is now available as a developer preview which introduces support for 32- and 64-bit Linux.

Oracle has consolidated on Java 7. It noted that August 2012's Java 7 Update 6 saw it take control of deployment of Java to the major desktop systems of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This should help with the company's ability to address the security problems that have plagued Java, particularly this year. Oracle has also made Java 7, finally, the default download on www.java.com.

(djwm)