During the last few weeks I did not really have a lot of time to update my blog. I had to prepare a few presentations and workshops on Java EE 5, JPA 1.0, EJB 3, JSF 1.2 and JBoss Seam. You can imagine this takes a lot of time During the process I also had to do some work for a new Java startup in which I`m actively participating called JPoint (Dutch).

But it`s time to write a blog post because a lot of interesting stuff is happening in Java land. First, IBM announced they will join the OpenJDK project. Development effort will shift from Apache Harmony to the OpenJDK project. This basically means the end of the Apache Harmony project.

Last week Oracle finally submitted the JSRs for Java 7 and 8. As already mentioned at the JavaOne 2010 keynote a lot of features have been dropped from Java 7 and will be moved to Java 8. JDK development will be done under the OpenJDK project.

Java module system
The Java module system (Project Jigsaw), which has my particular interest, will be moved to Java 8.

Timeline
Java 7 is expected to ship somewhere around mid 2011 and Java 8 is scheduled for end 2012.

More info
InfoQ has written up a nice article describing the contents of Java 7 and 8, have a look here.