So let's get one thing clear: Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne is huge. There are no empty hotel rooms in the city. The cabbies are flush with airport money, and the downtown San Francisco area is flooded with PeopleSoft coders, Java developers, database administrators, and more suits than you can shake a briefcase at. And through it all, there is still the annual drama. At this point, however, the drama is well known and not worth covering.

Instead, the real story of the show is the future of Java. And now, we have those juicy details we've all be looking for since Oracle closed the purchase deal for Sun. The answer to everyones question is: Oracle is going with plan B. That's Mark Reinhold's plan B. This plan forgoes some of the more development intensive features of JDK 7 in favor of a release next year. And that's great news.

Plan B stipulates that JDK 7 move ahead to completion without Lambda, Jigsaw, and part of Coin. That means we'll have to wait until 2012 and JDK 8 to get closures, some syntax and behavior enhancements, and a more modular underpinning for Java itself. I think we can all live without those for now. After all, JDK 7 will still have new cryptography handlers, a complete take on Unicode, better structural support for languages running on top of the JVM, and better support for concurrency. Those sound like compelling reasons to upgrade.