A puny Java 7 isn't the end of the world

Mark Reinhold just published a blog stating what has been painfully obvious to everyone following the JDK 7 development: There is no way that it will ship 2010. He thinks that mid-2012 would be realistic. Having followed the Project λ discussion, I can see where he is coming from. He asks whether Oracle should just package up what is already finished, run it through QA, and slap a Java SE 7 label on it (presumably after having it rubber-stamped by a JSR). Java SE 8 could come at the end of 2012, coinciding with the end of the Mayan long count. To nobody's surprise, almost everyone replied that it is better to have something now than maybe have something better later. What will be in Java SE 7? Here is the list, to the best of my knowledge, sorted in the order in which they matter to me :-) Performance enhancements and bug fixes Automatic resource management NIO.2 (the new new I/O) The fork/join framework Diamond operator Annotations in more places invokedynamic and an API for method handles. (I'd rate this higher if I knew AWT/Swing tweaks: JLayer, translucent and shaped windows, and an “improved” security dialog Minor language tweaks: strings in switch, underscores in literals, binary literals Nimbus What is missing? Closures The parts of the fork/join framework that depend on closures to be user-friendly [] notation for lists and ...

Date: September, 09 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/09/09/puny-java-7-isnt-end-world

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