Jul 15
Java 7 is finally here! Or to be absolutely correct, will be released July 28. In this post, I will point out 7 (wonder where I got that number from…) reasons to upgrade.
- Coins are also money
Project Coin contains a couple of nice language changes that will make life as a programmer much easier. See the project page for details. - Dynamic languages
invokedynamic adds support for dynamically typed languages on the Java platform. - New File System API
File operations have always been pain in Java, but with this new API most of the issues are solved. Manipulating symbolic links for example. - Concurrency
The Fork/Join Framework provides a set of utilities you would benefit from when writing concurrent programs, giving the possibility for true parallelism on the Java platform.
- Modularization
A refactoring enabling the Java SE platform to be downloaded as required by the VM as needed.
- Enhancements
A lot of enhancements regarding classloading, unicode, locale etc. - It’s new
And new things are always more motivating to work with than old, at least in the context of programming languages.
To be honest this is not very much for a major version of a programming language, especially since it has gone nearly five years since the previous version. But it shows that Java is still alive after the whole Oracle story.
