What with all the upheaval in the world of Java over the past year, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that a shiny new iteration of the core language, Java 7, is on the horizon, or at least is supposed to be. In fact, an actual honest-to-goodness Java 7 is nowhere close to reality, for various Java community political reasons. If you want a very clear and detailed description of the mess, Alex Miller is your man; the very short version is that Sun (and now Oracle) engineers have been busily working on an open source version of the Sun JDK for Java 7, and a number of important Java 7 features have been submitted as JSRs, but Sun (and now Oracle) has never actually submitted a Java 7 spec to the JCP. And without a JCP-approved spec, Java 7 won’t officially exist. Sun/Oracle’s refusal to do this probably is tied into the long-running Sun-Apache dispute over the spec TCK, something that’s been covered in great detail by Stephen Colebourne.But while all that political/licensing wrangling’s been going on, Sun’s busy bees have as noted been creating what will presumably become the Java 7 spec, assuming the dispute is ever resolved. And, as Miller points out, according to the project’s official calendar, JDK 7 is supposed to be feature complete … today, June 3! Can you hear the fanfare?[crickets] OK, perhaps this isn’t quite a big deal, but it is sort of mysterious that there’s been very little discussion of the what features are in and what are out. Last month DZone reported that closures, probably the feature that was most anticipated for this big revision, won’t make it in; I haven’t found any other news on this point one way or another. Why the silence? Is this indicative of how a project progresses outside the public scrutiny of the JCP? A sign that nobody at Oracle is paying attention or trying to publicize things? Or just a general disenchantment with the significance of this milestone? Java