The primary goal of this Project was to produce an open-source implementation of the seventh edition of the Java SE Platform, as defined by JSR 336 in the Java Community Process.
JDK 7 reached General Availability on 28 July 2011. Production-ready binary distributions based on the JDK 7 code base are available now from Oracle and will be available soon in most Linux distributions and from Oracle's Java SE licensees.
Detailed information on the main features of the release can be found on the features page. The JDK 7 development schedule was divided into a sequence of milestone cycles. A complete calendar of the entire development timeline is also available.
Development of JDK 7 update releases is being done in the nearby JDK 7 Updates Project.
History
After Oracle acquired Sun we replanned JDK 7 according to the "Plan B" proposal in order to accelerate its release while maintaining performance and quality. Features that needed more time to mature were deferred to JDK 8 or later releases as explained here. A handful of small, high-impact features which were not previously part of the plan but were finished, or nearly so, were added to the release.
The high-level schedule for the endgame of the release was as follows:
2010/12/23 Feature Complete (M11) 2011/02/17 Developer Preview (M12) 2011/04/12 Rampdown start: P1-P3 bugs only 2011/04/28 API/interface changes: Showstoppers only 2011/05/11 All targeted bugs addressed 2011/05/18 Bug fixes: Showstoppers only 2011/06/02 Last scheduled build (M13)
Final test cycle starts2011/07/28 General Availability
