JDK 7 is Feature-Complete

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

The JDK 7 Project has reached a major milestone: It is 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, M11, 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.

As with any large software project, there are some exceptions:

  - Two features are not quite finished but have been approved for
    post-FC integration: Update the XML Stack [1] and the Enhanced JMX
    Agent and MBeans [2].  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.

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.  Milestone 12, due in mid-February, will be the
"Developer Preview" release which we'll encourage developers, deployers,
and end users to download and test.

I've updated the project pages [3] to reflect current the status and
schedule.

- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f568
[2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f530073
[3] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/