Java EE 8 January Recap

January was a busy for month for Java EE 8, so here is a short recap of some of the activities that have occurred recently.

JSF 2.3 , JSON-P 1.1, and CDI 2.0 are now in Public Draft. It is important to check those three specifications and provide feedback before the end of their respective Public Draft period.

On the JAX-RS front, there has been a lot of progress as we now have concrete proposals for two of the three JAX-RS 2.1 ‘big ticket’ features, the Reactive Client API and the Server-sent Events support. Non-Blocking IO providers is the third ‘big ticket’ feature that should be discussed next in the JAX-RS Expert Group.

Gunnar Morling (JSR 380 Spec Lead) is reporting on the Bean Validation 2.0 progress and hopes to have Early Draft Review shortly. In the meantime, you can always check the draft as it progresses.

The Servlet 4 Expert Group is also making good progress as some of the technical implementations details of HTTP/2 (e.g. Server Push) are currently being discussed (see here). In addition, it seems that we can expect to see concrete discussions on the Security JSR (JSR-375) in the coming days. 

Finally, it should also be mentioned that the MVC transfer ballot has passed. That means that we can now proceed with the paper works and hopefully, Ivar Grimstad should officially be the new MVC spec lead very soon!

Concretely, we now have four Java EE 8 specifications in Public Draft (JSON-B 1.0, JSON-P 1.0, JSF 2.3, and CDI 2.0). So it is a good time to get engaged, test and provide feedback on those specifications. Watching the Adopt A JSR webcast that was recently hosted by the JCP is a good starting point to contribute.

It still very early but we can now observe a resurgent activity around the Java EE 8 Reference Implementation, i.e. GlassFish 5. On that point, we are obviously very aware of the Java.net dismissal. We are working to ensure that this does not impact Java EE, i.e. the Java EE related JSRs and the different RIs including GlassFish. We plan to share more concrete details on this as quickly as we can.