People have been asking me about the plan for Java 7 with relative frequency lately so I thought I would try to summarize what we know and what we don’t. [I maintain a somewhat out of date Java 7 page and a blog of incoming Java 7 links].
Terms
Before I go any further, [...]

An interesting discussion popped up this week about whether it would be useful to add a java.util.Pair in JDK 7. This has been requested many times in the past and I know I’ve heard some talk about it on the Java Posse as well. Pair is of course a special case for two [...]

Apparently Mark Reinhold announced that closures would be added to JDK 7 at Devoxx today:

I can’t say what to make of that really. For years Sun has been saying that there is no consensus on closures and delayed the formation of a JSR or expert group on the subject despite having three proposals, [...]

Doug Lea posted a note today on the concurrency-interest list that the bulk of the JDK 7 changes from JSR 166y (the second maintenance update) have been pushed in the latest JDK 7 M5 snapshots. You can find the API for these changes here.
The major updates are:
Phasers
A Phaser is kind of like a CyclicBarrier but [...]

I started off the morning at a pair of Java modularity talks by Mark Reinhold on Jigsaw and from Alex Buckley on JSR 294. Mark’s talk was apparently a dup of the technical general session yesterday but I missed that so that was actually good for me.
Project Jigsaw aims to provide a module [...]

For my last serious BOF of the night, I went to the Collections Connection with Josh Bloch, Martin Bucholz, and Kevin Bourillion. The under-stated goal of said BOF was to “Achieve world domination with the Java Collections Framework”. I believe they got 42.9% of the way there. In all, it was an [...]

I clearly remember talking to Michael Nygard last year after he saw a JSR 308 talk where he proclaimed that the Javapocalypse was near. The concern was that this JSR gave you the ability to annotate many more things and create much robust type systems, although in doing so you would so thoroughly annotate [...]

Joe Darcy has been running Project Coin to collect, sift through, and implement small languages changes for Java. This talk walks through some of the proposals that have been selected for consideration. At this point there are a dozen or so in play but only about half of those will actually be added [...]

Every year (can’t believe this is the 3rd year now) I have done a list of Java 7 talks at JavaOne and here’s my list for 2009:

Talk
Speaker
Relates to

The Java™ Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE Platform) Development Kit Version 7
Mark Reinhold
all

Small Language Changes in JDK™ Release 7
Joe Darcy
Language changes

The Modular Java™ Platform and Project Jigsaw
Mark Reinhold
JSR [...]

Two years ago, the OpenJDK Governance Board was announced with some hoopla as a new governing body for the newly open-sourced Java during JavaOne. The first few meetings and information from the governance board looked quite promising. Meetings were private but extensive minutes were prepared and put on blogs and in the mailing [...]

I woke up this morning to the news of Oracle’s agreement to buy Sun and I naturally have to wonder about what this means for Java and Java 7. Oracle has been focused on Java as the common language for enterprise software for a long time so I think this makes great strategic sense [...]

I just saw a post on Stack Overflow about what Java 7 will mean to Java programmers and while I responded there, I thought it was worthwhile to repeat those comments here as well.
As far as what changes you’ll see in your day-to-day work, my guess is that the major impact will be stuff like [...]

Project Coin is the new place to propose “small language changes” for Java 7. It’s being run by Joe Darcy and it’s open only for a limited time. So far, the mailing list volume has been way too high for me to keep up with. I’m still contemplating how to integrate this [...]

Java 7 will include several improvements in the collections and concurrency libraries under JSR 166y. One addition is a new interface called TransferQueue and a corresponding implementation called LinkedTransferQueue.
TransferQueue extends BlockingQueue which extends Queue interface added in Java 5 and adds some new methods. BlockingQueue expresses the concept of a queue [...]

It’s been a long while since I posted any kind of Java 7 update so I thought maybe it was time in case you haven’t been paying attention.
It seems that the dam broke at Devoxx in December. We got some clear direction on the expected timeline and what features will be in and out. [...]