Java Platform SE (Standard Edition) 9, a planned modularized upgrade, remains on target for release in July, an Oracle official said this week.

Java Development Kit (JDK) 9 is set for release on July 27. It will include a long list of capabilities, including modularization, a read-eval-print loop, ahead-of-time compilation, and a memory-saving improvement for strings storage.

Now categorized as feature-complete, the release had been delayed before due to the complexity of the modularization effort. Modular Java itself already had been deferred from Java 8, which was released three years ago this month, to Java 9. Modularity is intended to make Java more scalable, including improving its deployments on small devices.

Oracle's Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro, director of product management in the company's Java platform group, showed off some of the many highlights of Java 9 at the Oracle Code conference in San Francisco this week. A modular application packaging capability, for instance, is intended to reduce the size of the bundled runtime image and features module awareness and custom runtime creation. Ahead-of-time compilation compiles classes to native code before launching the virtual machine, thereby improving application startup times.

Also, the jShell tool will provide a read-eval-print loop capability, which lets developers evaluate declarations, statements, and expressions along with an API so that other applications can use these capabilities. A new version string scheme, meanwhile, provides for a string scheme to easily distinguish between major, minor, and security updates.