Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 arrive, 364 days later than first planned

Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 have arrived.

Version 9 of the Java development kit was supposed to ship on September 22, 2016, but delays and a dispute over the "Jigsaw" Java Platform Module System saw the release date pushed out to Thursday, September 21.

Which is precisely when Oracle announced that the two new versions of Java are ready to roll.

There are 91 new features to digest in JDK 9, but Oracle reckons its best bits are:

• jshell, thanks to a new "interactive Read-Eval-Print-Loop tool that makes it easy for developers to explore APIs and try out language features"
• Javadoc, now including a search function within the API documentation itself, as well as information on which module defines each class or interface
• Streams API enhancements, now with added methods to conditionally take/drop items from a Stream, iterate over a Stream's elements, and create a Stream from a nullable value while expanding the set of Java SE APIs that can serve as sources for Streams

Java EE 8 includes 13 new or updated Java Specification Requests. Oracle says the most notable changes include HTTP/2 support in Servlet 4.0, a new JSON binding API and various enhancements in JSON-P 1.1 and a new security API for cloud and PaaS based applications.

Python may now be more popular than Sun's spawn, but Java has enormous user and code bases, features on many university curricula and is likely to be with us for decades to come. These new releases will therefore be welcomed, as will Oracle's recent commitment to faster future Java releases. ®