The current Java.net poll question is “What is your view of the emerging JDK 7?” As of this blog post, the results are pretty mixed. Just over 40% of the 280 votes are for strongly positive replies of “major step forward” and “important features” while another 40% of respondents have chosen the strongly negative response “most significant problems are not addressed.” The rest of the votes are mostly for the lukewarm response “typical JDK release.”In some respects, I am a little surprised that there isn’t a higher percentage of dissatisfied respondents. With all of the angst expressed online regarding favorite features excluded from Java SE 7, I expected greater disappointment. It may be that some have resigned themselves to missing a favorite feature or two or it may be that many Java developers feel that the features still planned for Java SE 7 are compelling enough to warrant one of the two more strongly positive results.The comments on this poll are particularly insightful. These comments seem to validate my own experience and feelings: improved modularity is something to be excited about in Java SE 7, but it would be nice to have a better date/time API and it would be really nice to have reified generics. In general, I could have voted on a couple of the responses. Although I would have really liked to have seen some of the cut proposed features make it into Java SE 7, I am looking forward to better modularity, null safe operators, improved exception handling, and automatic resource management support. A JVM feature outside of the Java language that I look forward to is the improved support for dynamic languages. Software Development