The JDK 7 Milestone 4 builds are now available for download. This was the fourth of eight scheduled milestone cycles. The key new features introduced in this cycle were:

• Forward-ported features from 6u10: The New Java Plug-In, the Java Kernel, and the Quick Starter; and

• JSR 308: Annotations on Java types, an extension to the Java annotation syntax to permit annotations on any occurrence of a type, thereby enabling new kinds of compile-time error checkers.

The update to the XML stack was scheduled for M4 but unfortunately couldn’t be completed in time; we hope to see it in M5.

There are of course many other fixes and improvements; the complete list is available here.