This is a weekly update on new Java 7 information. All current and previous information is maintained on my Java 7 page.

Java SE 7 is available this week but the big news is that the repository is now hosted on Mercurial! Sounds like things are still a bit tentative, but this seems like a big undertaking and an important milestone. Kelly O’Hair gave his update #6 on the transition and Ivan Tarasov gives you instructions on getting started with Mercurial.

Language Proposals

We might as well call this the “closures” roundup today! Neal’s release of a closures prototype has started a lot of experimentation out there. Ricky Clarkson has done the following series of entries:

• Life in the old Java yet – Closures Prototype
• Java 7 Prototype – Surprises and Expectations
• Java 7 Example – Pattern Matching
• Java 7 Example – Writing Your Own Foreach

Michael Easter has been doing his own investigation with the following series:

• Java Closures: A Quick Look
• Searching Jars with Java Closures
• Closure Puzzlers: Greetings
• Searching Jars Redux

And finally bytecode guru Eugene Kuleshov peeked behind the curtains to see how things look inside.

And in some non-closure news, Stephan Schmidt had the idea of using a standard annotation for indicating licensing and/or copyright. I think it would be useful to have standard annotations for this as it would aid automatic checking and reporting of library licensing, which is something many organizations have to deal with.

More info: Closures