IBM have announced the availability of IBM SDK Java Technology Edition Version 7 for both their AIX platform and the Linux platform. The SDK is available for download from developerWorks and brings the compiler and runtime to the same level as found in OpenJDK.
Unlike the IBM JDK 6, the default garbage collection policy is now the generational concurrent garbage collection. This enables multiple garbage collectors to run and scan through an object's heap, and manage generations (nursery, heap, permgen) to deal with short-lived and long-lived objects. On AIX platforms, the shared classes cache support is enabled by default, which allows multiple JVMs running in memory to share the same class definitions for commonly-used classes (such as those in java.*).
The IBM SDK also includes metronome, a real-time incremental GC policy. Tihs is included for evaluation purposes only, although IBM notes that it is available for support through the WebSphere RealTime product.
Note that Windows is not supported by the SDK. Although a 32-bit runtime environment for Windows is available as a separate download, a BIOS check verifies that it is an IBM system. No 64-bit Windows platform is available.
More information about the contents of the SDK, along with a video interview with Trent Gray-Donald, IBM Java 7 Technical Lead, is available from the IBM developerWorks website.
