The JDK 7 Project has reached a major milestone: It is now Feature-Complete.
This means that all of the planned features have been implemented and integrated into the master forest, along with their unit tests, and all other planned tests have been written and run on a representative set of platforms.
The original plan called for this milestone, number 11, to be reached at build 122 on 16 December. We actually reached it the following week, at build 123, but it’s taken some time to verify that all this work was truly finished, and the verification process was itself delayed by the winter holidays.
Exceptions Yes, there are some, as with any large software project:
Two features are not quite finished but have been approved for post-FC integration: Update the XML Stack and the Enhanced JMX Agent and MBeans. The late integration of these features is not expected to affect the overall schedule.
VM, language, and library features governed by in-flight JSRs (203, 292, 334, and 336) are implemented according to their current—or shortly forthcoming—draft specifications. The implementations will be updated as those specifications evolve, and the release schedule will be adjusted if the Expert Groups of these JSRs decide to introduce changes that cannot be implemented in the time remaining.
What happens next? We’re already well into the process of running all tests on all supported platforms. The primary activity from here on out will be to fix bugs and track the evolving JSRs. I’ve updated the project pages to reflect current the status and schedule.
How can you help? Please don’t.
Well, to be clear, if you have only limited time to test JDK 7 then please wait until the Milestone 12 build, scheduled for mid-February, which will be our Developer Preview release. We haven’t yet run all tests on all platforms and we’re still fixing lots of bugs every day. We expect the most glaring issues to be fixed in M12, so we’ll strongly encourage developers, deployers, and end users to download and test that build.
In the meantime, of course, if you just can’t wait then by all means go download a build, install it, and have fun!