This is a weekly update on new Java 7 information. All current and previous information is maintained on my Java 7 page.
I happened to be in San Francisco this week during QCon and seemed to be a pretty great conference from what I heard. I didn’t actually make it over there due to, you know, doing actual work and stuff. :) But I did make it to the Terracotta happy hour (steaks all around) and the Google party, which was rocking. By the way, what was up with the DJ at the Google party? By the end of the night he looked ready to pass out on his turntable. Granted, he was pretty much ignored by the high-powered geekitude in attendance, so maybe he just gave up on us.
Anyhow, MacWorld has a nice overview of Chet Haase’s talk related to Java 7 direction at QCon. For regular readers of this roundup, shouldn’t be much surprising but good to see that the list hasn’t varied too much.
Libraries
JSR 294 has submitted the Early Draft Review docs. These docs are not yet publicly available.
More info: JSR 294
Language Proposals
Again this week, most of the news is about language changes for Java 7. Neal’s closures prototype continues to spark interest and curiosity as people apply it to their own favorite problem. There were a couple nice posts this week from Debasish Ghosh on closures and abstraction and on using closures to implement infinite streams. Charles Oliver Nutter also took a pass at using the prototype to clean up some JRuby code.
Stephen Colebourne announced a new project called kijaro for investigating language changes. Specifically, Stephen is working on implementing his own FCM closures, Remi Forax is working on his properties proposal, and Fred Simon is working on his abstract enum proposal all on top of the kijaro project.
We also saw a burst of small API enhancements from Doug Lea, Josh Bloch, and Kevin Bourrillion that seem likely to get in for Java 7. And finally, Stefan Schulz put some effort into a prototype of his meta-interface support.
It’s great to see all of these prototypes coming out so early in the game. I wish I just had time to play with some more as these are all interesting ideas!
More info: Closures