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Talk about a slow pour: Oracle now brewing late Java EE 8 for July 2017

You could set your watch to it ... but best not

Oracle says it will finally land Java Enterprise Edition 8 in July 2017 – only eight months behind schedule.

Java EE 8 was due to appear at JavaOne 2016, last September, but following a development hiatus, it was bumped back to the “first half” of 2017. In October, Oracle revised that date again by promising to deliver the software “within the year.” That would bring it out by JavaOne 2017, due to be held in early October this year.

Now, Oracle’s Java EE 8 specification lead Linda DeMichiel has set a target of July, five months from now and inside Big Red's “within the year” window. At the same time, DeMichiel said a public review of Java EE 8 will kick off in April or May, with the proposed final draft in June.

“These are the target dates we are working against for our specifications, including the Platform. A number of [Java specification requests] are further along, and are expected to complete well in advance of these dates,” DeMichiel wrote on Tuesday.

While the due-date does come with that caveat of being a “target,” the update will likely come as a relief to Java followers. Java is improved through community-led development, but the majority of engineers working on the code hail from Oracle, which assumed responsibilities from Sun Microsystems when it bought the Java and Solaris biz in 2010.

Delay, though, crept in when Oracle’s development team inexplicably went AWOL in 2016, with engineers understood to have been reassigned to work on Oracle’s own cloud efforts.

That hiatus drew a stinging rebuke from community members and the saw emergence of the MicroProfile project, now with Eclipse, to keep Java EE contemporary. ®

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