King Java 7 is Dead, long live King Java 7!

FInally, after months years of discussions, Java 7 finally has a certain release date.  Fortunately, Plan B won, which means that all the available features are going to be shipped soon (mid 2011), and all the nice-to-have's including Project Lambda are delayed until Java 8, in late 2012.


This is great news for a community left in dire needs for an upgrade after almost 6 years (by the time of the release), and a half version (Java 6 update 10) which was shipped under the covers with many features pressing to be released.


This has huge implications for the Scala community, which can deliver today what Java would only be able to offer in 2013, while improving day by day thanks to the JVM 7. I can foresee a JVM increasingly more detached from the Java language itself, and Scala becoming a new powerful and widely accepted language.


Modular Java? with OSGI 4.2 available, why bother waiting?


Furthermore, IBM just announced that will be joining OpenJDK, ending years of dispute with the aborted Apache Harmony JDK.


So, good news for the JVM ecosystem.