We spend a lot of time here at Java To Go talking about the long term future of Java, both in the “What will happen when/if Oracle and Sun finally merge” sense and in the “Is Java dying/stabilizing/becoming uncool” sense. But that can often skip over the more concrete and immediate future of the language, which is being plugged away on despite these distractions.The immediate future is Java 7, which is scheduled to be unleashed by September 2010; that may sound far off, but trust me, it’ll be here before you know it. Joe Wright has an excellent summary from Devoxx of some of the big language changes in store, including collections, automatic resource management, binary literals, and more. There’s even real live code! See the future in action!Of course, there’s always those yearning for what they don’t have; Axel Rauschmayer has compiled a list of what he calls Java’s missing features — some of which will arrive with Java 7, some of which will not. This has become something of a community sport — “So sick of ‘articles’ lamenting what is ‘wrong’ with Java,” one commenter laments — but closures are on the top of Rauschmayer’s list, and not just his list. As I mentioned last week, they might yet appear in Java 7, though we should probably not be holding our breath. Java