The Big Java News Keeps Coming: Java SE 6 and OpenJDK

I recently posted Recent Java 8 News, summarizing some of the recent developments in Java 8. In less than a week since publishing that post, several more significant Java news stories have come out and I summarize some of these in this post. Common themes include different Java SE 6 implementations and OpenJDK.

In February 2012, Oracle extended the end-of-life for its Java SE 6 implementation from July 2012 to November 2012. This was later changed to February 2013 as shown in the Java SE EOL Policy under the section "Java SE 6 End of Public Updates Notice": "After February 2013, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 6 to its public download sites." Plans were slightly changed, however, due to discovered security vulnerabilities that led to two more Critical Patch Updates (CPUs): Java SE 6 Update 41 and Java SE 6 Update 43. Note that the odd numbers in the releases (41 and 43) indicate CPUs rather than limited updates. Oracle encourage developers to move to Java 7 for future updates.

It was announced this week that RedHat will take over leadership of the OpenJDK 6 project. As stated in the Red Hat press release, this move "effectively [extends] support for [OpenJDK 6] and its users." This is especially significant, of course, given the imminent end-of-life of the Java SE 6 implementation provided by Oracle.

I recently posted on the announcement of plans to put JavaFX on iOS and Android. Now, there's talk via an OpenJDK JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP #178 - "Statically-Linked JNI Libraries") of "[enhancing] the JNI specification to support statically-linked native libraries." This becomes even more interesting than it may initially sound when one considers implications such as the potential for this to allow Java applications to be deployed to iOS.

It was announced this week that JAXConf US 2013 is open without charge to attendees to attend two days of keynotes and conference sessions (Tutorials day is $299). The conference is being held in Santa Clara, California, in early June (June 4-5).

Although not necessarily news, there are other recent Java posts of general interest. Java Version History outlines some of the features introduced with each major version of Java/JDK. Geert Bevin uses the post My three-year Java abstinence: there and back again to look at "three reasons why I came back to Java and the JVM": community, tools and technology, JVM (and Java). Another recent post that was surprisingly interesting is Edmund Kirwan's JUnit's evolving structure that looks at how JUnit (in particular version 4.3) delved into a convoluted package structure that is difficult to visualize. That post references radial encapsulation as one way to avoid this.