Barring the last-minute discovery of any severe bugs, the company expects to release the final version of Java 7 on July 28, making it the first major update of the language in five years.

"We all know for various business and political reasons that this release has taken some time," said Oracle chief Java architect Mark Rheinhold in a webcast Thursday, referring to Oracle's 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems, which then controlled Java.

In a blog item posted Wednesday, Rheinhold that a pre-release build of the JDK (Java Development Kit) 7, build 147, is the first, and maybe the only pre-release Release Candidate for the programming language and associated runtime environment.

The new release is more evolutionary than revolutionary, Rheinhold said. "There are some significant improvements though nothing really earth-shattering," he said.

One feature that Rheinhold extolled is an improved I/O interface for working with file systems. The file API (application programming interface) specification supplants the java.io.file package.