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年05月09日 M7 Feature Complete
 2013年07月18日 Rampdown start
 2013年09月05日 M8 Developer Preview
 2013年09月12日 All Tests Run
 2013年10月10日 API/Interface Freeze
 2013年10月24日 Zero Bug Bounce
 2013年11月21日 Rampdown phase 2
 2014年01月23日 M9 Final Release Candidate
 2014年03月18日 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/