Proposed new schedule for JDK 8

Thu Apr 18 09:28:11 PDT 2013

As I wrote earlier today on my blog [1], the Java 8 schedule is no longer achievable due to a renewed focus on security on the part of all of us here at Oracle. There are many options for how to proceed from here, some of which I discuss in the blog entry. As I've written previously [2], the most important JEPs that we've slipped into M7 are related to Project Lambda, the sole driving feature of the release. Our current estimate is that we can finish the remaining work on Lambda by early May, about three months later than planned. The other M7 JEPs are not release drivers, so in theory we could just drop them from the release, but if Lambda needs more time then there's no point in doing that. With all that in mind, I think the least-bad option is to slip the schedule just enough to finish Lambda. Here, then, is a proposed new schedule for JDK 8: 2013/05/09 M7 Feature Complete 2013/07/18 Rampdown start 2013/09/05 M8 Developer Preview 2013/09/12 All Tests Run 2013/10/10 API/Interface Freeze 2013/10/24 Zero Bug Bounce 2013/11/21 Rampdown phase 2 2014/01/23 M9 Final Release Candidate 2014/03/18 GA General Availability A final release in March of 2014 is, of course, more than three months later than the current GA date in early September. At this point we're not confident that we could be ready for a GA release in November, and experience has shown that it's almost always a bad idea to try to ship a major software release in December, so that pushes the GA date well into the first quarter. The intent here is not to open the gates for a flood of new features, nor to permit the scope of existing features to grow without bound. We'd likely propose a select few additional features, especially in areas related to security. In general, however, we'd use the additional time to stabilize, polish, and fine-tune the features that we already have rather than add a bunch of new ones. Is this the best possible course of action? I think it's better than the alternatives, but I'm open to suggestions. I'd like to hear from other contributors to this Project, especially those involved in efforts to use the JDK 8 code base to build binary distributions that are expected to see wide use. Please let me know your thoughts by this time next week. In the meantime I'll post the above proposed schedule to the JDK 8 Project page [3] for reference. - Mark [1] http://mreinhold.org/blog/secure-the-train [2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8-dev/2013-February/002066.html [3] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/