Brace yourselves - Java 10 is coming! (in March 2018)

I was just as shocked and excited when I was told of this news at the last Jozi JUG event for the year, that happened this past Monday (27 November 2017). In reality, Java 10 is coming out to the real world in March 2018.

In the recent Devoxx conference that was held in Anvers, Belgium (that occurred on the 06th to the 11th November 2017), Mark Reinhold (@mreinhold) gave a talk on "Moving Java Forward Faster" and he emphasized on a particular keyword: adoption. Java 9 was recently released (on 21st September 2017 to be exact) and I doubt that many developers have moved to Java 9 and/or migrating Java 9 to their production systems (certainly I am just learning Java 9 myself).

"For Java to remain competitive in this day and age it...must...not...just continue to move forward. It must move forward faster!" exclaims Mark. Mark's bold plan? Doing a feature release, "every 6 months, like clockwork on a strict time-based schedule". Oh, for each feature release, the version number is incremented by 1. In essence, Java 9 was released in September 2017, Java 10 will be released in March 2018 (Java 9 + 1), Java 11 will be released in September 2018, Java 12 will be released in March 2019, etc., (you get the picture).

What does that mean to us, developers? Faster adoption. In order to be competitive and relevant you will have to find time to understand the Java release cycle, its features and how to migrate your systems to the latest Java release. No pressure!

You can watch the full keynote presentation Mark presented at Devoxx Belgium on what's to come by "Moving Java Forward" (the release cycle, the support cycle, etc.) below, which is available on YouTube.

What do you think of this release cycle plan? Does it work for you? Have you started using Java 9 yet and are your systems working fine in Java 9 in production? I will love to hear from you.

Happy coding! :)