Yesterday was day 3 of JavaOne 2016. Oracle and the Java community is planning new features for the upcoming Java EE 8. I've been attending as many Java EE related sessions as I can, to see what the current plans are. All the speakers have made a point to state that nothing is carved in stone, all of this may change as it is still in planning stages.
I started the day attending "Cloud Native Java EE", a tutorial by Payara engineers Mike Croft (@croft) and Ondrej Mihályi (@OMihalyi). The talk was very good and explained how to deploy Java EE applications to the cloud using Payara Micro.
I then headed over to Antoine Sabot-Durand's (@antoine_sd) session on CDI 2.0. Antoine is the CDI spec lead and obviously knows his stuff. He covered several new features coming to CDI 2.0 such as support for Java SE, asynchronous events, and the ability to add interceptors at runtime to CDI beans. That last one I thought was very impressive, I hadn't ever imagined that would even be possible.
Next I went to a JAX-RS 2.1 session by Ed Burns (@edburns) and Pavel Bucek (@pavel_bucek). The session covered several new JAX-RS features such as non-blocking I/O, server sent events and a reactive client API.
After that I attended "Portable Cloud Applications with Java EE" by Rajiv Mordani, Joe Dipol, Josh Dorr. This session covered how Java EE 9 will standardize the ability to deploy Java EE applications to different cloud providers.
The next session I attended was on Servlet 4.0, delivered by Ed Burns (@edburns), discussing new features of this new version of the Servlet specification. This session started with a brief overview of network programming, Ed took some of us old timers in a trip down memory lane, mentioning things like CGI and Gopher. Of particular interest in this session was Servlet 4.0 support for the HTTP/2 protocol. Ed was very good at explaining how this new version of HTTP addresses several limitations of the current HTTP 1.1 protocol supported by most browsers.
The last session I attended was "Security for Java EE 8 and the Cloud", by Kk Sriramadhesikan. The session covered security challenges posed by cloud environments and how the Java EE spec plans to address it. The new version of the Java EE Security API aims to make it easy for application developers to secure their cloud applications, leaving the details to security experts.
As evidenced by all of these great sessions, major changes are coming to Java EE in the not so distant future, looks like we will have some exciting times ahead.
