JDK 7

Oracle released JDK 7, available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and embedded platforms. Mac OS X Developer Preview also was released.

IBM, Apple, SAP, Azul and—most recently—Twitter have joined OpenJDK.

Oracle has successfully integrated its Java development teams, JRockit and HotSpot.

Oracle officials said the JDK 8 project will be released in the summer of 2013, with the addition of Project Jigsaw, Project Lambda, JavaFX 3.0 and more. ??í

JavaFX 2.0 went GA in 2011, providing a migration path for Java client user interface (UI) technologies. JavaFX 2.0 is an advanced Java UI platform for enterprise business applications and the next step in the evolution of Java as a premier rich client platform.

Oracle has set a strategy to bridge Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) and Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) platforms, with synchronized releases and Java ME APIs to run on Java SE. This move is for full coverage of embedded vertical markets. The Java Platform will cover all CPU/footprint variants. There will be dedicated APIs for vertical market segments.

Oracle announced Oracle Public Cloud, with a proposed Java platform as a service (PAAS) offering. The Oracle Java Cloud Service is an enterprise platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications based on Oracle WebLogic Server. It supports development and deployment from multiple Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), including Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans and Eclipse.

Oracle officials say Java Platform Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) is in the works. The proposed Java EE 7 shows Oracle prepping Java EE for the cloud with service definitions and service provisioning to enable Java as PAAS. It also will enable multi-tenancy in APIs. Java EE 7 is well underway with 10 active Java Specification Requests (JSRs) being worked on through the JCP by more than 20 participating companies and represented by hundreds of engineers.

With Project Avatar, Oracle announced plans to improve the interoperability between HTML5 and Java technology in order to simplify the development of rich client/server interaction for cloud-based applications.

Extending the support for Java standards, NetBeans IDE 7.1 Beta provides support for JavaFX 2.0, enabling the full compile, debug and profile-development cycle for JavaFX 2.0 applications. The NetBeans IDE now has more than 1 million active users with developers increasingly selecting the NetBeans IDE to rapidly create desktop, Web and mobile applications using the Java platform, as well as with PHP, JavaScript and Ajax, and C/C++.