I see the Java Warehouse is now open to a few more countries: Australia, Brazil, China, India, Russia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Although, unlike U.S. residents, developers can only submit free applications to be downloaded through the Java Store. They also won't incur the $50 annual membership fee until they are able to submit paid for applications. You can find the full access details (and the reasons behind the country restrictions) at the Java Warehouse Developer Center. Access to the Java Store is still only open to U.S. residents.

The Java Warehouse and Java Store are currently working as a beta release. If you're in one of the selected countries and are having problems, check the release notes for known issues and workarounds.

Mark Reinhold, who announced the probable inclusion of closures into JDK 7 at Devoxx '09, has blogged his thoughts on why they're back on the Java agenda. He's looking at a simpler proposal than the ones discussed in Understanding the closures debate.

Incidentally, you can see Mark's talk (as well as the other Devoxx '09 presentations) if you are a subscriber to Parleys.com.

One of the interesting announcements to come out of Devoxx '09 this year is the decision to include closures in JDK 7. The decision whether to include them or not has been debated for ages and just when it seemed that they weren't going to be, now they are. If you've missed the whole closure debate there's an excellent article on JavaWorld - Understanding the closures debate (although exactly how closures will be implemented is still not certain).

The announcement also coincided with the news that the release of JDK 7 has been put back to September 2010 to allow some extra time to complete a few additional features like closures.

Devoxx '09, the Java community conference being held in Antwerp, was in full swing this week. I've just been trawling around to pick up some links to what's being going on:

• Geertjan Wielenga has posts on day 1 and day 2.
• Erik Jan de Wit also shares his experiences of day 1, day 2 and day 3.

There's an mp3 available of a Q&A session that James Gosling did with the Java User Groups.

And, Joe Darcy has posted the slides from his Project Coin talk. They give a bit of an idea about the thinking behind the language changes.