In case you didn't notice it, Oracle has released the first JDK 7 for Mac OS X made under its own responsibility. This is a historic milestone as in the past decade Apple did the whole job of porting, after some previous poor attempts by Sun. Unfortunately, Apple's work became unsatisfactory too, at least in some respects like constant delays or missing security patches such as those that shed some bad light on Java.

Thus I welcome Oracle's effort to directly provide a JDK for all the major operating systems.

I just installed JDK 7u4 for Mac OS X and tried a first smoke test with NetBeans IDE 7.1.2. For these purposes, it was enough to set this property in "netbeans.conf":

netbeans_jdkhome="/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home/"

Some previous attempts with early access builds over the past month ended with a few show stoppers, mainly in the integration with the Mac OS X menu bar and other graphic amenities.

With JDK 7u4, there have been no major problems after twenty minutes of use and compiling a few Maven projects: only an internal error that doesn't seem to affect usability (see http://statistics.netbeans.org/analytics/exception.do?id=577424) and a minor rendering issue on the borders of the search box.