As I wrote earlier today on my blog [1], the Java 8 schedule is no longerachievable due to a renewed focus on security on the part of all of ushere at Oracle.There are many options for how to proceed from here, some of which Idiscuss in the blog entry. As I've written previously [2], the mostimportant JEPs that we've slipped into M7 are related to Project Lambda,the sole driving feature of the release. Our current estimate is that wecan finish the remaining work on Lambda by early May, about three monthslater than planned. The other M7 JEPs are not release drivers, so intheory we could just drop them from the release, but if Lambda needsmore time then there's no point in doing that.With all that in mind, I think the least-bad option is to slip theschedule just enough to finish Lambda.Here, then, is a proposed new schedule for JDK 8: 2013/05/09 M7 Feature Complete 2013/07/18 Rampdown start 2013/09/05 M8 Developer Preview 2013/09/12 All Tests Run 2013/10/10 API/Interface Freeze 2013/10/24 Zero Bug Bounce 2013/11/21 Rampdown phase 2 2014/01/23 M9 Final Release Candidate 2014/03/18 GA General AvailabilityA final release in March of 2014 is, of course, more than three monthslater than the current GA date in early September. At this point we'renot confident that we could be ready for a GA release in November, andexperience has shown that it's almost always a bad idea to try to ship amajor software release in December, so that pushes the GA date well intothe first quarter.The intent here is not to open the gates for a flood of new features, norto permit the scope of existing features to grow without bound. We'dlikely propose a select few additional features, especially in areasrelated to security. In general, however, we'd use the additional timeto stabilize, polish, and fine-tune the features that we already haverather than add a bunch of new ones.Is this the best possible course of action? I think it's better than thealternatives, but I'm open to suggestions. I'd like to hear from othercontributors to this Project, especially those involved in efforts to usethe JDK 8 code base to build binary distributions that are expected tosee wide use.Please let me know your thoughts by this time next week. In the meantimeI'll post the above proposed schedule to the JDK 8 Project page [3] forreference.- Mark[1]http://mreinhold.org/blog/secure-the-train[2]http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8-dev/2013-February/002066.html[3]http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/