Oracle is planning JDK 8 according to a post to the mail.openjdk.java.net list, and while the major changes and enhancements are settled, there’s still room for other features both large and small.

Mark Reinhold, Oracle chief architect for the Java platform group told the openjdk group that proposals would be collected, sorted and prioritized. Displaying a great lack of faith in databases for someone working for Oracle, he suggested that the feature suggestions should be collected in a Mercurial repository as structured text files, saying that

“One can imagine all sorts of fancy database-backed systems that would fulfill these requirements, but we need something sooner rather than later."

He’s obviously tried putting together Oracle database systems before somewhere.

Oracle took over as the ‘owner’ of Java when it acquired Sun Microsystems, and set out a road map for how JDK would develop through versions 7 and 8 last September at the JavaOne conference. A preview version of JDK was released last week to some criticism of the licensing agreement with comments posted on Reinhold’s blog saying the license terms are ‘draconian’.

Among the proposed features for JDK 8 are:

Lambda expressions (”closures”)

Small language enhancements (Remaining parts of “Project Coin”)

A Java-native module system (“Project Jigsaw”) to simplify the construction, packaging, and deployment of applications

JVM start-up time and ergonomics improvements

Lambda, Coin and Jigsaw were all originally scheduled for inclusion in JDK 7, but Oracle decided to concentrate on getting JDK 7 out this year, leaving these features that were furthest from completion to be part of JDK 8, which is not expected to see daylight until late in 2012.

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