Introduction

OpenJDK 7 is a free and open source implementation of Java Platform, Standard Edition Version 7. At the time of writing this book, it is the latest version of OpenJDK that was ready for the production usage.

Initially, a lot of advanced changes were planned for OpenJDK 7, such as the modular VM and lambda expression support, but due to various technical and organizational reasons, after Sun Microsystems' acquisition by Oracle, most of the new features were postponed for the next versions of OpenJDK. This expedited the release. It reached General Availability status on 28 July 2011 and was the first OpenJDK version released as a Reference Implementation for the Java platform.

The major updates to OpenJDK 7 numbered update 2, update 4, and update 6 were released during the next year. After that, version numbering was changed and the next update 40, which is the latest version at the time of writing, was released in September 2013. The following update 60 was planned for May...