#project jigsaw

[traversal]

In my opinion it is Project Jigsaw which will be the biggest and best change to the whole platform. That is why it is such a pity that it has been delayed. Just imagine the classpath craziness and the jar hell going away, and being replaced by a standard way of expressing dependencies between libraries, applications etc. Of course such a change has a lot of implications, and this presentation by Mark Reinhold goes through most of them, and shows how this whole thing will work in Java 9.

[traversal]

As probably everybody already knows, Project Jigsaw, the project to introduce modularization and an actual module system to the Java platform, is being deferred from Java 8 to Java 9 (meaning from next year to 2015). The above link points to Mark Reinhold's post announcing this. Here's an earlier post of him, in which he details the reasons for such a delay a bit more. And here's an overview of the project itself, from last december.