Alex Miller has posted a full summary of features being considered for Java 7.0. He has also included links to a number of discussions that are taking place. Included in his list of features being considered for Java 7 are;

• JSR 277 Java Module System
• JSR 294 Improved Modularity Support
• JSR 295 Beans Binding
• JSR 303 Beans Validation
• JSR 296 Swing Application Framework
JSR 203 NIO2
• JSR 220 Java Persistence APIs
• JSR 255 JMX 2.0
• JSR 262 Web Services Connector for JMX
• JSR 260 Javadoc Technology Update
• JSR 275 Units and Quantities
• JSR 310 Date and Time API
• JSR 308 Annotations on Java Types

In addition to this page, Alex publishes a weekly summary of what new happening. You can find one such example of this summary at his blog site.

1. Partial classes - allow class to be defined in more then one file. This is very usefull with code generation. As a mater of fact, custom code generation tools (that do not attepmt to be too general, but just generate repetitive code, while letting non repetitive code to stay hand writen) is almost impossible without partial classes. Current solution is to force inheriting generated class, but this has too many limitations. 2. Complete escape analysis and stack allocation optimisation. 3. NIO2 +1, new Date and Time API +1, inclusion of Persistence API +1, JMX 2.0 +1

Java 7 new features are present in .NET framework. Interesting.