JCache to Miss Java EE 7

In August 2011 InfoQ reported that JCache was "alive and going to be part of Java EE 7". That prediction was made by Terracotta's Greg Luck, who is one of the three spec-leads for JSR-107 - the JCache API. It was unfortunately not destined to be fulfilled.  

Late last week Oracle's Brian Oliver, another JSR-107 spec-lead, announced that "unfortunately we've missed a few of the key delivery dates for JSR-107 to be included in Java EE 7" and, whilst noting that this was ultimately a decision for the JavaEE 7 platform group he added "it's only reasonable to notify everyone that it's now highly unlikely JSR-107 will be included in Java EE 7." Later Linda Demission, who along with Bill Shannon leads the Java EE 7 umbrella spec, confirmed that JCache had been dropped.

This announcement will disappoint many users. In December 2012, the Java EE Expert Group announced the results of their survey which was intended to gather a reading on JSR's the community would like to see included in Java EE 7. JCache was also seen as being very important as expressed with comments like: "JCache should really be that foundational technology on which other specs have no fear to depend on".

Oliver made it clear that "tremendous progress has been made in the past few months", and that "work is going to continue in earnest, and at the same pace."

JSR-107 Expert Group member Ben Cotton told InfoQ that "The decision to delay JSR-107's official inclusion in Java EE is not a barrier to application developers using JCache. JCache provides to the Java Caching community exactly what JDBC provided to the Java RDBMS community, a standard API. In the same way that you can use JDBC independently from the JEE provider, you can use JCache without a JEE provider, by just downloading the jars."

Java EE 7 is still expected to be a major release with a host of new features including WebSockets, JMS 2, JAX-RS 2, JSON-P, Java Batch, EE Concurrency, and many other features. Please visit Reza Rahman's SlideShare presentation for a look at all of the new features.

To keep up with the latest news about the next Java EE release and about JCache, please follow the dialogs at Java EE 7 EG and JCache EG.  You are encouraged to provide your feedback.