Java 7 Roundup (October 29th)

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

Kelly O’Hair issued update #5 on the move to Mercurial. Sounds like things are getting close!

Modularity

JSR 294 is preparing for an early draft milestone with experts due to submit their feedback today, so should be soon. There has been some discussion of a few aspects on the mailing list, such as the use of different keywords, access control, etc.

More info: JSR 294

Libraries

The Date and Time API (JSR 310) mailing list has been hopping lately. Stephen Colebourne seems to be masterfully guiding it towards a converging API. You can check out the latest version of the API javadoc with the current thinking on names and other topics of interest or check out the mailing list to see what’s happening or register your own thoughts.

More info: JSR 310

Swing

In the beans binding (JSR 295) world, there is a brand new 1.1.1 release, with dramatically improved performance.

More info: JSR 295

Language Proposals

The biggest news of the week is certainly Neal Gafter’s release of a prototype BGGA closures compiler! In particular he has also reworked Doug Lea’s fork/join library (part of JSR 166y being added in Java 7) so you can see how it changes. I recently did some work with the fork/join library (still need to blog about that) so I’m looking forward to digging into that a little more.

Ricky Clarkson had some early thoughts and feedback on the prototype as well.

In the miscellaneous ideas category we had some more ideas from javablog and an idea for “delegation” from B.K. Oxley.

More info: Closures

Other languages on the JVM

In the jvm-languages Google group, Charles Oliver Nutter of JRuby fame made an interesting proposal for a new exception type called a jump. The jump could not be caught which would allow non-local control flow things such as closures but would trigger finally blocks as stack frames were popped. Seems like a cool idea.