Status of "Incubator Modules" (JEP 11)

[Chris Hegarty]

Volker,

On 14/11/17 17:55, Volker Simonis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> the Goals section of the "Incubator Modules" JEP [1,2] reads as follows:
> 
> "The incubation lifetime of an API is limited: It is expected that the
> API will either be standardized or otherwise made final in the next
> release, or else removed."

JEP 11 predates the shorter release cadence, hence the current
wording. While not strictly incorrect, and in light of the shorter
cadence, this wording could be better.

> OpenJDK 9 was shipped with the httpclient incubator module and I
> havn't seen any effort to standardize this API in Java 10/18.3.

While there are no plans to standardize this particular API in Java
10, there is ongoing work to move it towards standardization. This
work has been happening in the JDK 10 sandbox, and recently moved
over to the new JDK sandbox ( on the http-client-branch [1] ).

> Does this mean that the new httpclient library will be removed from
> OpenJDK 10/18.3? 

It is my understanding that the folk working on this API are
planning to "refresh" the current incubator code in 10, based on
the work in the sandbox. Expect to see announcement to this effect
on net-dev shortly.

 > Or should we better revise JEP 11 and rephrase the
> Goals section to something like:
> 
>   "The incubation lifetime of an API is limited: It is expected that
> the API will either be standardized or otherwise made final in the
> next LTS release, or else removed."

I don't think that it is appropriate, or even necessary, to tie
incubating features to LTS releases. I will do a full review of JEP
11 and reply shortly.

-Chris

[1] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/sandbox/branches