7 reasons to upgrade to Java 7

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Dynamic languages
    invokedynamic adds support for dynamically typed languages on the Java platform.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Modularization
    A refactoring enabling the Java SE platform to be downloaded as required by the VM as needed. 
  6. Enhancements
    A lot of enhancements regarding classloading, unicode, locale etc.
  7. 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.

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