Milestones
The JDK 7 development schedule is divided into a sequence of milestone cycles, each five to nine builds in length, with builds occuring roughly once each week. There will be no formal beta or early-access releases, as in the past. Major features and other potentially-destabilizing changes will targeted for integration early in a specific milestone. For more information, please see the current draft of the JDK 7 Development Process.
Here is the current high-level milestone schedule, with the features targeted to each cycle:
M1 2009/01/02 – 2009/02/19 (b48) 7 builds Compressed 64-bit object pointers Garbage-First GC (G1) M2 2009/02/20 – 2009/04/02 (b53) 5 builds JSR 203: More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2) Method to close a URLClassLoader M3 2009/04/03 – 2009/05/14 (b59) 6 builds JavaOne Preview Create new platform APIs for 6u10 graphics features JSR 292: VM support for non-Java languages (InvokeDynamic) Nimbus look-and-feel for Swing SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol) Unicode 5.1 Upgrade class-loader architecture M4 2009/06/05 – 2009/07/23 (b66) 7 builds Forward-port 6u10 deployment features JSR 308: Annotations on Java types M5 2009/07/24 – 2009/10/29 (b75) 9 builds Feature complete Concurrency and collections updates (jsr166y) Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) JSR TBD: Small language enhancements (Project Coin) Swing updates Update the XML stack M6 2009/10/30 – 2009/12/24 (b82) 7 builds M7 2010/01/01 – 2010/02/18 (b89) 7 builds Release candidate
The final milestone cycle, M7, will be followed by a release-candidate test period of indeterminate length, but most likely four to eight weeks, after which the final release will be declared.
Some features have been approved for the release but are not yet targeted to a specific milestone. When they are targeted then they'll be added to the above table.