The standard edition of Java 7 has nowbeen released. This is why Oracle and other Java Community Processmembers are racking their brains over what all features can bepresent in the new version of Java SE 8.

Mark Little, the senior director ofengineering for Red Hat's middleware business and Red Hat's primaryliaison for the JCP quoted, “Java 8 is supposed to set the scenefor the cloud, for a wider deployment arena.” He further noted thatOracle has left out many advanced features planned for Java 7 toavoid any further delay on its release. Thus, the features whichhaven’t been included in Java 7 will now be added in Java 8.

According to Little, at least twofeatures of Java 8, multitenancy and modularity will prove to beinstrumental in it. Multitenancy is the ability of Java VirtualMachine to safely run multiple applications. The other feature ismodularity or reorganization of Java Development Kit.

Little quoted, “Modularity and truemultitenancy within the JVM will be critical for 8 if Java will bedominant in the cloud.” He added that modularity is one of the mostimportant aspects that Red Hat would like to see in Java 8 as itwould reduce the size of Java deployments. The feature would alsoprove to be of great use to the developers as it would allow them tocope up with only the useful parts instead of dealing with the entirecodebase.

Modularity would also prove useful tosolver the “classloader hell” which is a developer’s majorproblem. Developers face this issue when the Java Program numerousJARs (Java Archives). Little added, “In order to have modulesswapped in and out at will without screwing up the whole environment,you need to have support in the JVM as well.”

In fact, Project Jigsaw is totallydedicated to this cause. In fact at the time when Sun Microsystemscontrolled Java, its developers preferred Jigsaw over OSGi(OpenServices Gateway initiative). The Project Jigsaw was engrossed forJava 7 which was later pulled in 2010 to ship Java 7 in 2011. Littletold that all the developments in Jigsaw and OSGi would beintertwined in Java 8. He said, “There will be some modularitypresent in Java SE 8.”

Besides, modularity other features ofJava 8 would be multitenancy. This feature would be great for cloudcomputing as multiple partners share the same infrastructure in it.According to Little, “If the JVM itself isn't offeringmultitenancy, then there is only so much we can do before the wholething can potentially get screwed up by rogue tenants in the sameJVM.” Little advocated the addition of JVM so that each applicationgets its own memory space. He said, “a rogue app will not [spillover into] a memory space you saved for another app running in thesame JVM.”

Little was supported on the idea byForrester Research analyst John Rymer who said, “Addingmultitenancy to JVM is important. Today, each vendor must come withits own way of virtualizing its application server”.