Java chief architect Mark Reinhold gave a presentation titled Java 9 and Beyond at the EclipseCon keynote that was held this year from March 9-12 in San Francisco. Reinhold talked about the upcoming Java 9 updates, as well as what is going to happen with java in the future after Java 9 release. He focused on the benefits of Java modularization.
“Modules themselves can express dependencies between them, but packages are also exported from modules for the use of others. Due to internal implementation details, some packages (such as sun.reflect.* from the java.base module) are made available to friends (likejava.logging and java.sql) although these won't be visible to normal Java code. Dependencies are transitive, so code that depends on java.sql will automatically inherit a dependency on java.logging, in the same way that Eclipse bundles using Require-Bundle operate,” according to InfoQ.
Reinhold said during his presentation that just like Java 9, new versions of Java that will launch in the future, will more likely include small language additions, but so far, any predictions about what will happen with Java ecosystem after the Java 9 release, are “highly speculative.”
Reinhold also mentioned that JVM additions like value classes and enhanced generics for value types are likely to be included in Java future versions. According to an article by Alex Blewitt, Java chief architect mentioned Project Panama, “which aims to improve the performance of Java to Native code calling with the Java Foreign Function Interface proposed in JEP191 based upon JRuby's existing JNA and JNR implementations.”
Reinhold concluded his presentation talking about the Java evolution so far, while emphasizing Java’s big steps with every release. As we have mentioned in a previous article about the Java 9, Reinhold has lately explained the reasons why the release of Java 9 will be delayed. “We've made good progress on Jigsaw over the last 18 months. We reorganized the source code into modules in August 2014 (JEP 201), restructured run-time images to support modules in December 2014 (JEP 220), began discussions in the JSR 376 EG last February, and published a design overview, draft specification, and EA builds in September. More recently we presented an integrated series of talks on Jigsaw at JavaOne 2015 and Devoxx BE 2015,” Reinhold wrote.
Java 9 is expected to launch in May 2017. If you want to read more about why Java 9 release is delayed, click here.