Mark announced the availability of JDK 7 M4 (downloads) which is roughly mid-way through the Milestone RoadMap.

M8 is the last milestone, due in early Jan'10, then are RCs and Final releases. That would give plenty of time before J1'10, except that some details are still pending...

The Feature List is quite interesting. Besides features I already knew about, like G1 GC and InvokeDynamic Support, the list includes a couple of new Network APIs SCTP (Wikipedia) and SDP (Wikipedia) and ECC Support.

I cannot catch up with all the backlog of OpenDS news in a single post so for now I'll just mention the Availability of OpenDS 1.3 b2 and then I want to highlight the work related to Garbage First (G1) GC.

G1 is our most recent Garbage Collecting algorithm and it is intended to replace the current CMS (see John's Overview of JDK's GCs) in JDK7. G1 is sketched in Alex's note; more details in TS-5419 or try it by yourself in a recent OpenJDK. The OpenDS team has high demands for performance and responsivenes which makes them a good demanding customer for the G1 team (like CBOE!) and, in a recent visit, the two worked together to improve performance - see Matt's writeup. A good example of the advantage to Sun of leading both projects!

Report on the last week of submissions for Project Coin's week 4. 26 new proposals in the last week, 70 altogether; with over 1100 messages in the mailing list. As the song goes... Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) (or a language no longer deemed cool...). In addition to the relevance of the Java Language, I see this is a good example of the benefits of an open process, with a receptive project leader.

Too many interesting examples to highlight - but I'll choose two from John Rose: JSR 292 Support (mail) and Expressions in Strings. Looking forward to more details on the analysis of the submissions.

Nice progress on Project Coin, the project for accepting small changes to the Java Language.

Joe is reporting over 17 proposals in his latest post, including familiar names like Neal Gafter, Josh Bloch and Bob Lee, but also many others; I tried to get an up-to-date count from the Mail Archive but there was hard to count... which is good. I think the project will be a big success, and may be a good indicator of the type of activity possible through OpenJDK. I'll keep you posted, in the meantime, check out Joe's status update and his Strings in Switch proposal.

The Java language has seen a few big additions like Generics but also a number of small changes. These changes are less glamorous but they continuously improve the "fit and finish" of the language and I'm happy to see today's announcement by Joe on the new OpenJDK Project Coin targeted to JDK 7. To get the full background check Joe's description of What's Needed to add a new Java language feature (spec changes, implementation, tests...); his announcement of small changes in JDK 7; and then the criteria for these changes.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

A compilation of today's news of interest to our readers:

A compilation of today's interesting news:

Now that almost all the app servers - except Geronimo? - are providing extensibility via OSGi, we all need at the least some basic knowledge on it so check out Arun's Deploying on GFv3 and Geertjan OSGi in GlassFish in 5 steps. Stay tuned for more OSGi information from us, in the meantime you can check out more entries at Arun on OSGi; and TheAquarium on OSGi.

Direct user programming on OSGi is less universally adopted. On the server-side JavaEE 6 will support extensibility and modularity. And, on the client side (one rev farther on the OpenJDK Modules project) there is the proposal for Supporting OSGi Bundles in the Java Module System and Mandy's recent blogs on: OSGi Repository for Java Module System and Support for the module keyword.

Added Just noticed Johan's note on Running GFv3 on KnopflerFish.

Dalibor is joining Sun to work as a Java F/OSS Ambassado, helping projects like the OpenJDK. This is excellent news! Welcome aboard, Dalibor! Check out Dalibor's Announcement and Comments and Barton's Welcome.

Reports from MR, Barton and Simon all indicating that Red Hat has signed both the Sun Contributor Agreement and the OpenJDK Community TCK License. This is good news for Java SE and Linux developers. The SCA will also help other projects like GlassFish; as you may have tracked (JBoss@TA) JBoss is using a few GlassFish components (JSF, Metro, others); the SCA will make it easier for RedHat employees to put contributions back into those components.

John Rose has proposed a new OpenJDK project, the Multi-Language VM. Years ago John and I worked together on Scheme-related projects and I know his expertise and commitment to this area, so looking forward to the evolution of the project, specially given the goals of Java EE 6. Send responses to the Discuss@OpenJDK alias. I see there is already one follow-up Added: John has published a summary for the first JSR 292 EG Meeting/a>.

Projects like GlassFish and OpenJDK have similar challenges like Resources and Timing (not having a handy Time Lord) to balance today and tomorrow's requirements, address existing and new customers, build community and deliver products...

At GlassFish we are going through several phases ([0], [1], [2], [2b], [3]). At OpenJDK, Joe Darcy describes the latest plans for how to go Forward to the Past: Toward OpenJDK 6, combining the move towards JDK 7 with delivering a useful implementation for today's Java SE specs.

Today Sun made available a new license for the TCK for Java SE (the JCK). The license is targeted to developers building on OpenJDK and simplifies testing that modifications built on OpenJDK are compatible. Check on these perspectives: Rich, Tom, Simon and Robilad. The release has also been reported by several news sources including: FirstCall, InfoWorld, CNet Old timers may recognize some ideas from the pre-GlassFish JDL license.

The FOSS.IN 2006 conference starts tomorrow in Bangalore and it looks really good. Check out the Schedule, which includes presentations on GlassFish, Portal, OpenSSO, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, Derby and much more. More perspectives from Sahoo, Sivakumar, Moinak, Joe, Madhu and Pratibha.

I think I need to start planning to attend next year :-)