The primary goal of this Project was to produce an open-sourceimplementation of the seventh edition of the Java SE Platform, asdefined byJSR 336 in theJava Community Process.
JDK 7 reached General Availability on 28 July 2011.Production-ready binary distributions based on the JDK 7 codebase are available now fromOracleand will be available soon in mostLinuxdistributions and from Oracle'sJava SElicensees.
Detailed information on the main features of the release can befound on thefeatures page. The JDK 7development schedule was divided into a sequence ofmilestone cycles. A completecalendar of the entire development timeline is alsoavailable.
Development of JDK 7 update releases is being done in the nearbyJDK 7 Updates Project.
After Oracle acquired Sun we replanned JDK 7 according to the"Plan B" proposal inorder to accelerate its release while maintaining performance andquality. Features that needed more time to mature were deferred toJDK 8 or later releases as explainedhere. A handful ofsmall, high-impact features which were not previously part of theplan but were finished, or nearly so, were added to therelease.
The high-level schedule for the endgame of the release was asfollows:
2010/12/23 Feature Complete (M11) 2011/02/17 Developer Preview (M12) 2011/04/12 Rampdown start: P1-P3 bugs only 2011/04/28 API/interface changes: Showstoppersonly 2011/05/11 All targeted bugs addressed 2011/05/18 Bug fixes: Showstoppers only 2011/06/02 Last scheduled build (M13)
Final test cycle starts2011/07/28 General Availability