Java EE is becoming open source software

“Moving Java Forward Faster” looks like the Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group’s new motto. Mark Reinholds states in this article https://goo.gl/dTbFHx that “A two-year release cadence is, in retrospect, simply too slow.”

A few weeks ago, Oracle announced that a major step was being done in opening up Java EE.  

On 6th September 2017, after about three weeks, a new piece of news is out.

Thinking of developers looking forward to catch the newest shiniest tecky wave, Mr Reinholds proposes to speed up to one feature release every 6 months and to push out a major update every 3 years which would be a long term supported versions borrowing a successful model coming from other languages and operating systems. The Long Term Support version could see the light in September of 2018.

With all the Java base code freely available, new vendors might produce different flavors of Java implementations, the same way it happens with Linux distributions.

Oracle accustomed us to a cycle of evolution/revolution that is an alternation of an evolutionary version (such as Java 7) and a revolutionary one (such as Java 8) with a scheduled interval between them of 2 years. But this was not the actual delivery date, because of late developments or security fixes delivery date have been somehow slippery.

Delivering more often means deliver less functionalities per release but keeping the overall delivered set of functionality the same or even making it bigger because smaller releases are easier to master. For applications wishing to keep up with a new version, upgrades should result in smoother processes with deployment resulting less impacted by this or that newly introduced functionality.

Do you want to check if Oracle, flying under the radar, is releasing more and more components of Java EE? The Java EE repository is already public and you can find it here: https://goo.gl/hrfssy