JDK 8 M6 status, and extending M7

Wed Feb 20 14:54:33 PST 2013

The final build of M6 was promoted on 2013/1/31 (b75). Work on the following JEPs was not completed in time for M6, so I've retargeted them to M7: 104 Annotations on Java Types 115 AEAD CipherSuites 162 Prepare for Modularization I've updated the milestone and feature pages [1][2] accordingly. Looking at the updated milestones page, it's clear that we did not achieve our goal of being Feature Complete in M6. Over the last couple of months we slipped a total of sixteen JEPs from M6 into M7, in some cases in order to smooth the logistics of integrating large projects and in others simply because more time was needed to finish the work. The most important JEPs that we've slipped into M7 are those related to Project Lambda, the sole driving feature of the release. The language and VM work for Lambda has already been integrated, but at least another six weeks are needed to refine the stream API and finish the related core-libraries enhancements (JEPs 107 and 109). The other M7 JEPs are not release drivers, so in theory they could be dropped from the release, but if Project Lambda needs more time then there's no point in doing that. The last build of M7, currently slated for tomorrow, is intended to be the Developer Preview release, when we'll encourage broad testing by the entire Java community. We'll get the best results from that exercise if the release is actually Feature Complete at that point, so I think we should extend M7 accordingly. It will take some time to determine how much of an extension is needed. I expect to post an updated schedule in the next month or so. - Mark [1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/milestones [2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/features