As many of you may already know, JDK 7 has been delayed to 2012. Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, wrote a blog today with an explanation for this. The article titled "Re-thinking JDK 7" explains why JDK 7 got delayed.

To sum it up, Mark said that they didn't know their most recent JDK 7 development schedule was unrealistic. They didn't know the post-acquisition integration process would take longer than any of his team has anticipated. He says that now they know, they are able to focus on the release with a still growing staff.

The now planned release of JDK 7 is now estimated around the middle of 2012. The reason Mark gives is that they had other projects, which they made a lot of progress on.

When you're blind or visually impaired, your options in software reduces by a lot. You will need a screen reader of some kind that works with the program but sadly, not all programs works with one. The software needs to be programmed in a way that makes it possible for the screen reader to scan the software.

Now in July 2010, students and researchers from Southern Illinois and Washinton State cooperated at a project for blind programming. The goal is to increase accessibility of programming software for blind people. One of the project members: Dr. Andreas Stefik says that they are creating a custom compiler, debugger, virtual machine, and blind compatibility library (called Sappy) into NetBeans IDE in an attempt to broaden participation of the blind in the computing discipline.

In the next video you will see a recent workshop at the Washington State school for the Blind, where the students and teachers get to try and learn programming in NetBeans with this new system.

Ever wanted to fly in an aerobatic plane? Or do you want to meet the Black Eyed Peas, Don Henley or The English Beat?

Oracle Develop will give out amazing prizes if you register between September 3 and September 10. Just make sure you purchase a 2010 Conference Pass for Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne and Oracle Develop, a Discover Pass or Discover Plus.

There are 10 prizes in total to win, which include:

Just a few days ago JBehave released version 3.0.

Coming to your area: the 2010 Red Hat Road Tour. What makes this tour interesting? It's a half-day professional business conference about IT infrastructure: focusing on cloud computing, virtualization, middleware and the future of IT. These subjects will be covered by Red Hat cloud experts.

Red Hat says that their vision of IT is different in a positive way than of any other IT vendor. They know that IT infrastructure exists of many different pieces of hardware and software vendors that must cooperate with each other. They say that they recognize IT businesses want to grow and improve their IT systems and operations gradually and not through wrenching change. And they know that you want to do so in a way that preserves your strategic flexibility and keeps your options open.

They are going to visit areas in DC or Atlanta. Below you can see which cities on what date will be visited in the tour:

 "It's the most intelligent Java IDE. IntelliJ IDEA deeply understands your code and gives you a set of powerful tools without imposing any particular workflow or project structure. IntelliJ IDEA is your dream pair-programmer who knows its way around the codebase, makes great suggestions right when you need them, and is always ready to help you shape your code."

"We at JetBrains believe that making tools for developers should greatly involve listening to developers. Our Early Access Program lets development community closely participate in discussions devoted to IntelliJ IDEA and influence development planning, from early stages onwards.

 Early Access Program allows you to try pre-release versions of our software to evaluate features that will be added to the next release." 

For those who missed it: NetBeans 6.9.1 IDE is available. Also available is Java SE 6 Update 21.

NetBeans 6.9.1 IDE 

NetBeans is an IDE for developing with Java, JavaScript, C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, Scala, and more. It is written completely in Java , you will need JVM installed to run it and a JDK is required if you plan on programming in Java.

For those who haven't seen this teaser for JavaZone yet... Check it out. It's very good, pay attention to the lyrics. ;)

  

The Groovy development team has just released Groovy 1.6.5.  This new release is mainly a bug-fix release. A second beta of the upcoming Groovy 1.7 branch will also be released very soon.

You can download Groovy at the usual place. And you can learn more about all the bugs fixed in the JIRA release notes.

Original (short) blog entry here.