A new milestone of the next generation JDK has been released, which includes several new features and enhancements in many functional areas, like garbage collection, NIO and more. This is also the first version where OpenJDK and JDK will have (almost) identical code-bases.

Xiomara Jayasena informs us about the roadmap for the next milestone:

Development for Milestone 4 continues and we expect for it to complete towards the end of July. The source for b59 can be downloaded any time, from the Mercurial Repositories by doing the following: hg fclone -r jdk7-b59 http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7 myjdk7

There is also a detailed roadmap at openjdk site that leads up to the final milestone in 2010/02/18.

You can find there a draft of the list of features that will be proposed “when the Java SE 7 Platform JSR is submitted”:

Features are listed in order, more or less, from lowest to highest in the overall JDK software stack. vm Compressed 64-bit object pointers

Garbage-First GC (G1)

JSR 292: VM support for non-Java languages (InvokeDynamic) lang JSR 308: Annotations on Java types

JSR TBD: Small language enhancements (Project Coin)

JSR 294: Language and VM support for modular programming core Modularization (Project Jigsaw)

Upgrade class-loader architecture

Method to close a URLClassLoader

Unicode 5.1

Concurrency and collections updates (jsr166y)

JSR 203: More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2)

SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)

SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol)

Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) client XRender pipeline for Java 2D

Forward-port 6u10 features

Create new platform APIs for forward-ported 6u10 features

JSR 296: Swing application framework

Swing updates ee Update the XML stack

There is more information about JDK 7 on the documentation site or right here on InfoQ.