Oracle lays out Lego-like future of Java

 Developers have plenty to look forward to in Java, given efforts afoot to add modularization and to improve data access and performance.

Java "evolves by taking on the next big pain point," said Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Java platform group at Oracle, in a presentation Thursday on Java 9 and beyond at the EclipseCon conference in Burlingame, Calif. Java 5 featured generics; Java 8 introduced lambdas, he noted, and "in Java 9, we'll be introducing modularity to create a scalable and more secure platform. Beyond 9, we're thinking about value types, specialization, form function interfaces and so forth. The general theme there is more efficient access to data and better control over data layout in memory to achieve higher performance."

Reinhold used the conference to again stand on the modularity soapbox. "For one thing, [modularity] will help deal with the fact that from the beginning, the Java SE platform has been this huge monolithic thing," he said. Developers have been required to install the whole platform even if only a limited part is needed. "What we want is a box of Lego parts, [which are] modular that we can assemble as needed," Reinhold explained.