
The question was asked recently on a FreeBSD mailing list, "
What will be new in FreeBSD 5.0?" The thread discussed several ways a person could obtain such information, one good source being the latest release notes. The first developer preview of 5.0 was released on April 8th. The final release is targeted for the end of this year. Robert Watson offered an interesting summary of items to look forward to in FreeBSD 5.0, including: SMPng ("next generation" symmetric multiprocessing), KSE (improved scheduling), devfs (automatic /dev management), Firewire support, and much more.
Read on KernelTrap for more details.
"They are still working on the JDK 1.3.1 port..it's definitely taking longer than they thought."
I think there might also be some lack of motivation to work on it. Basically, the Linux Java SDK runs so well under FreeBSD that its sometimes hard to convince people that there should be a native port.