Java has gone through many changes over the past year. At the beginning of the year, Java EE was in a state of limbo, with Java 9 pushing back its release date. At JavaOne 2016, Oracle announced plans to address the platform and information about Java SE 9 and OpenJDK 9.

In June 2017, the Java Community Process Executive Committee voted to approve a Java platform module system called JSR 376, which lays the foundation for Java 9.

In August 2017, Oracle announced that it was moving Java EE to the open source camp. A month later, Oracle moved Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, and Oracle continued to support existing Java EE licenses. According to Oracle, moving to the Eclipse Foundation allows organizations to adopt a more flexible approach to management.

The Eclipse Foundation has many other open source projects and community-based governance approaches to enhance project collaboration and rapid innovation.

In September 2017, Java 9 was released. It has a modular architecture, rather than the monolithic architecture of previous versions of Java. This allows for extensibility on smaller devices, a feature that should have been included in JDK 8 but wasn’t ready when it was released.

JShell adds read-eval-print-loop functionality to Java, allowing developers to get instant feedback as they write code, which is useful for beginners and even experienced Java developers trying out new apis, libraries, or features. Several other new features improve COMPILATION and performance of the JVM, as well as enhance the core libraries.

At JavaOne in September 2017, when a group called Java Guardians tried to get Oracle to give Java EE more attention to move forward, Oracle finally started talking about Java EE and said it planned to complete and release it in 2017. By July 2016, however, developers were still waiting for a Java EE update, and there was no Oracle news during that time.

Also in September, Oracle proposed changes to the Java SE and JDK release cycles to make releases more flexible. It expects major releases every six months from March 2018, Java 9 updates will continue to be released quarterly, and major releases will be released every three years.

At JavaOne in October 2017, several software tools offered have announced new services. Parasoft released an update to Jtest, a Java unit testing assistant. JNBridge has released java.vs, a plug-in that allows developers to write Java code in Visual Studio. Java.vs also has a Java code editor, a Java project system, and allows Java developers to use VS’s capabilities to build systems and debugger interfaces.

From: sdtimes