JDK 8 M7 update

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

When I proposed the new JDK 8 schedule [1], since adopted [2], I wrote:

  The intent here is not to open the gates for a flood of new features,
  nor to permit the scope of existing features to grow without bound.
  We'd likely propose a select few additional features, especially in
  areas related to security.  In general, however, we'd use the
  additional time to stabilize, polish, and fine-tune the features that
  we already have rather than add a bunch of new ones.

In that spirit, I've added the following JEPs [3] to M7:

  * 176 Mechanical Checking of Caller-Sensitive Methods
    178 Statically-Linked JNI Libraries
    179 Document JDK API Support and Stability
  * 180 Handle Frequent HashMap Collisions with Balanced Trees
  * 184 HTTP URL Permissions

Those marked with '*' are directly related to improving the security of
the platform.  The other two are reasonably small:

  - 178 is a small enhancement to JNI that's critical to the use of SE 8
    in embedded scenarios; and

  - 179 builds on 162 (Prepare for Modularization) and proposes to define
    one or more annotations to document the stability of JDK-specific
    APIs.

I've dropped these two JEPs because they won't be ready for JDK 8:

  143  Improve Contended Locking
  165  Compiler Control

Finally, I've retrospectively added

  177 Optimize java.text.DecimalFormat.format

to M5; the code was integrated back in October, but the JEP got lost in
the noise.

Also of note is

  182 Policy for Retiring javac -source and -target Options

which is not a feature JEP for JDK 8 per se, but rather a new long-term
policy that has been proposed to take effect in JDK 8.

Finally, just yesterday I posted one more security-related JEP:

  185 JAXP 1.5: Restrict Fetching of External Resources

This will likely be added to M7 after suitable review.

I've updated the JDK 8 feature and milestone pages accordingly [4][5].

- Mark


[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8-dev/2013-April/002336.html
[2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8-dev/2013-April/002413.html
[3] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/
[4] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/features
[5] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/milestones