Oracle's Hasan Rizvi used his appearance at the JavaOne 2012 keynote address to detail plans for the future of the Java platform. As executive vice president for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java, Rizvi was joined on stage by AMD's Phil Rogers to discuss Project Sumatra, which was recently approved in the OpenJDK Community.

NOTE: Project Sumatra will explore how Java can be extended to support heterogeneous computing models for improved performance and power consumption. The primary goal of the project is to enable Java applications to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) and accelerated processing units (APUs) — whether they are discrete devices or integrated with a CPU.

Oracle confirmed that plans for Java SE 8 are moving forward and the firm announced a revised roadmap for the release, with availability expected in late 2013.

"We will continue to provide the Java community with a transparent roadmap so that they can plan ahead for future updates and platform releases, and we will continue to collaborate with contributors throughout the community in the evolution of the platform," said Rizvi.

Oracle also confirms that it plans to propose Project Nashorn, a new JavaScript engine for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Plans will be submitted later this year in the OpenJDK Community. Oracle also expects to enhance Project Nashorn with the support of several other OpenJDK Community contributors, including IBM, Red Hat, and Twitter.

NOTE: Pronounced "naz-horn", Project Nashorn is dedicated to the development of a JavaScript engine Java Virtual Machine intended to make use of JVM libraries. This in turn will ultimately allow the firm to offer higher performance than the existing Rhino JavaScript engine.

As already reported news on Dr. Dobb's, there is news of Java Enterprise Edition (EE), which the company marks out as "hugely popular with increasing developer adoption" and over 50 million downloads of Java EE components, including Oracle GlassFish Server.

Java EE 7 is targeted for release in the second quarter of 2013, with new features that will help facilitate building scalable HTML5 applications, including support for non-blocking (event-driven) I/O Servlet 3.1 API, JCache, JSON-P, WebSockets, JAX-RS 2.0 Client API, JPA schema generation, and an improved security configuration, which Oracle says can "particularly benefit" applications deployed to cloud environments.