Well, it looks like JDK 7 is going to be delivered sometime in 2011 and JDK 8 will be in 2012. I’m all for smaller releases and shorter time between them. The only way to get adoption of new technologies is to get them out into the hands of developers and see how it plays out. The community wants a release so bad they are ready to take anything at this point. It has been 5 years since the release of JDK 6 and while it is a very good release, there are many things promised that would improve the platform and give it life again.

Waiting another 2 years to get features that are in Scala today seems like a waste of time. Sure, there are many developers who can wait since they are still working on projects with JDK 4 or 5. These shops will be ready for the new features when they are good and ready. The rest of us want the new JDK now though, and it looks like the wait is going to be even longer.

I have not looked at Scala before now, but I’m going to. My development work is still in JDK 6 for the Android platform. I don’t see that changing in the near future, but as far as languages go, Scala seems to have the mind power behind it to make it. The other languages I have looked at such as Groovy, JRuby, et. al. are nice, but it appears that momentum is behind Scala and so that is where I’m going to be focusing my learning. I just hope that JDK 7 comes out sooner than later.