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They're still coming, but have been put off until JDK 8, which is scheduled for late 2012 (about 6 months later than the original JDK 7 scheduled date). By the fast-moving standards of the software world this does make them a long way off, though...

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Read carefully:

"Deferred to JDK 8 or later"

In the Java world, this is a good way of saying never ...

Especially when you are writing Java code to run on client machines. There it's not even safe to rely on 1.4 features yet.

So I guess I'll be able to use closures the moment I can stop trying to make my web pages work in IE 6: in the yeat 2040

That's maybe the one most important problem arising with Java if you are using it in an environment you do not know or not know well (as it is, on client machines - especially using Java on the web). As of it, using Java 7 features in Web pages - no way, maybe no way ever if you do not want to exclude a big mass of people out there on the market.

People still write client side Java? shudder I love Java, but good god would I never write an Applet again.

You do realise that 'client side' includes people's own machines, right? You don't need to do applets for those.

Besides, applets are way way better now than they used to be.

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