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.

I've just been playing with Project MaiTai, a new graphics tool built using JavaFX v1.2.1. It lets you create interactive graphics by using building blocks that can be images, music, streams from Flickr or Twitter, RSS feeds, input from a mouse or keyboard, effects (e.g., blur, reflection, etc..) and more. Each block has different options allowing you to customize the effect it has on the graphics being created. Finally, the finished output can be exported as a movie file or a JavaFX application.

It's a very nifty tool that's quite fun to muckaround with. It's still being developed but if you want to have a go, just click on the beta link under Downloads on the right hand side of the Project MaiTai website.

There's more chat about the Java Store in the latest episode of the Deep Dive series. Ed Ort talks to Bernard Traversat, Director of Engineering for the Java Store in Deep Dive: Java Warehouse and Java Store. The video is in three parts as Bernard gives an overview of the Java Warehouse and Java Store, shows how to submit an application to the Java Warehouse and looks at the Java Store front end.

If you're a developer who wants to tap into a potential market for your Java applications the video is worth a look to see how the Java Store and Java Warehouse can help you. The Java Store is expected to open to U.S. market shortly and expand to other countries in 2010.

At Paypal's first developer conference it was announced that the Java store will be using Paypal for application payments:

Developers can price their offering anywhere from $1.99 to $200.00 (USD) and select the license rights they wish to apply to their application. Developers will receive 70 percent of any for-fee application sold through the Java Store Beta. Utilizing the new Adaptive Payment API from PayPal, consumers can authorize the Java Store Beta to bill against their PayPal account so they can simply click the "Buy" button and never have to leave the store.

There's a link to the new client application for shopping in the Java Store on James Gosling's blog. He's looking for feedback as they're keen to launch to the U.S. market soon.

Joe Darcy has written an interesting blog post on the implementation of strings in switch statements, one of the changes accepted for inclusion in JDK 7 from Project Coin. The post highlights the steps he went through to modify the language.

If you like playing with the early access releases for JDK 7 you'll soon be able to use strings in switch statements in the milestone 5 release.

This week sees the release of Update 17 for JDK 6 which can be downloaded at the normal Java SE downloads page. Looking at the release notes, it's a security and bug fix release.

It's worth noting that this release coincides with the end of service life for JDK 5.

I've just been listening to the This Ain't Your Dad's Java team's latest podcast. This week the episode - Sh*t Happens, We're Sorry can be found online here. Or you can listen to it through iTunes with this link.

The podcast is about an hour long and is worth a listen if you want to hear about the Java Store (about 18 minutes in). The Java Store is due to go live (presumably just for the U.S.) in the next couple of weeks.

Have you been testing your JavaFX knowledge by playing the Tech Test Train? If so, you might be interested to know that it has been updated. Although, I should point out that when I tried to play it on Mac OS X 10.5.8 it crashed as soon as I pressed the "Play the Game" button (Edit: Working fine on the Mac now..). I did however have better luck with Windows XP.

The new version now allows your score to be carried over across the different routes allowing for a chance to get a grand total of 27,000 points. It's also had some performance tweaks. You can play the game on the JavaFX website.

Related Articles:

Just in case you're eagerly awaiting the next version of Firefox (a beta version of Firefox 3.6 is scheduled for some time next week), it's worth taking note that you'll need to be running a version of Java that's 6 update 10 or later in order to run Java applications in the browser. If an earlier version is installed you'll simply see a box where the application should be with a link to download the latest version of the Java plug-in.

Although I'm not sure what this might mean for Mac users as Apple haven't properly released their version of Sun's new Java Plug-in that came with Java 6 Update 10.