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Java 7 - and now 8?!

It'd all gone pretty quiet on the Java 7 front recently - the last that'd been heard for a while was an estimate of a late 2010 release. I was hoping no news was good news on this front and that sometime around Christmas we might hear something positive regarding a release - alas this isn't the case.

This link sheds some light on things: http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/rethinking_jdk7

To summarise, it seems now that JDK7 is going to have an estimated ship date of mid 2011, *but* with a lot of the new features everyone was raving about (including Lambda, Jigsaw and parts of Coin) pushed back to JDK8 which should hit home in around 2 years time. The other approach detailed is shipping JDK7 with all its original bits in mid 2012 with no updates in the meantime.

Everyone was hoping for something a bit quicker, yes, but I guess with the Sun / Oracle acquisition slowing things down Java was bound to take a bit of a back seat. It's not such bad news, and if anything I'm mildly encouraged by the fact Oracle are leaning towards the approach to release early and postpone features rather than the "release everything in one go and hope for the best" approach.

...Yes, I know, I did just say something vaguely positive about Oracle!

It'll be interesting to see how this situation unfolds, whether plan B does actually happen and if so whether it'll happen to schedule.
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