Java Magazine, July/August 2017
ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JULY AUGUST 2017 04 from the editor work through the hard parts of the collaboration than to abandon the effort We are all better served by the collaboration than by insisting on our own preferences The understanding of collective benefit has long driven Javas history and is indisputably integral to its success It can be easy to forget that the development of Java and the JVM is itself a collaborative effort The development work is done as open source in public repositories and the discussions about feature selection code implementations release dates and other points of contention are held in public mailing lists In fact the recent decision regarding the new release date and the specific reasons for the delay were all posted and replied to on public forums Now let me ask you do you know of any other language whose principal corporate sponsor assigns more than 100 engineers to work on the language and yet defers on matters of release date to a community of partners There are only three companies outside of Oracle that have made so large a commitment to language development Apple Google and Microsoft But none of them have adopted this open consensual approach Im not here deprecating those companies work on their languages or their preferred approach but rather Im trying to underscore how unique Oracles approach with Java is I recognize that my acceptance of delay in the name of collaboration is borne of an insiders view of Java community operations Many Java developers have no interest in the politics behind release dates and couldnt care less whether discussions are held in public or not they just want the new technology to be released and so are frustrated by the succession of delays This perspective is driving an initiative to make innovations available on a predictable schedule This new approach proposes publishing whatever technology is good to go when the announced date arrives Georges Saab vice president of development for the Java Platform group at Oracle states that this new approach will be adopted in post Java 9 releases It will mean less waiting for a single central feature to be ready before lesser improvements are shipped Ironically enough this strategy is possible now because of the modularity in Java 9 that can localize the effects of a given change In sum the delays of this release are the necessary product of the open collaborative model that underlies Javas success If youre a supporter of open source and open collaboration then you surely recognize that such delays are a sacrifice that the process demands In that sense it is the antithesis of releasing by unilateral fiat Nonetheless I am excited that modularity makes possible future releases on a defined schedule while maintaining the commitment to high levels of collaboration Andrew Binstock Editor in Chief javamag_ us@ oracle com @ platypusguy
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