After one year vacations Java EE 8 was rebooted and is going to be optimised to run on hypervisors and / or container environments. Java EE 8 will focus on the following areas below -- it is a proposal and very likely to change in the JCP process:

Extend for reactive programming Unified event model Event messaging API JAX-RS, HTTP/2, Lambda, JSON-B, (...)

Package applications, runtimes into services Standalone immutable executable binary Multi-artifact archives

Persistence and query interface for key value and document DB

Automatically event out changes to observed data structures

New spec - interfaces, packaging format, manifest Ephemeral instantiation

Externalize configuration Unified API for accessing configuration

Increased density Tenant-aware routing and deployment

API to store externalized state

Extension to support client-side circuit breakers Resilient commands Standardize on client-side format for reporting health

Secret management OAuth OpenID

The choices are pragmatic and will make Java EE an even more productive platform. I'm only missing a slightly extended and modernized "Concurrency Utilities for Java EE" (jcp.org/ja/jsr/detail?id=236). Particularly the ThreadPool configuration and Backpressure could be easily standardized just by agreeing on features from https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ThreadPoolExecutor.html. Particularly useful would be the integration of the statistics (e.g. Bulkheads) with the Health Check API.

Also a standardized management API (not proposed) would simplify the creation of application images through a unified API.

Java EE 8 and 9 will come at light speed to an application server vendor near you. Java EE 8 is expected to be delivered in 2017 and Java EE 9 in 2018.

Oracle is listening now, take the chance and participate at the survey (takes a few mins): glassfish.org/survey