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Ryan Harrison My blog, portfolio and technology related ramblings

Java 7 Released

A few days ago Oracle announced the availability of their new Java 7 SDK. Some of of the major changes include -;

  • New I/O APIs (Asynchronous I/O)
  • Strings in switch statements
  • Unicode 6.0
  • Elliptic-curve cryptography
  • Translucent and shaped windows
  • Heavyweight/lightweight component mixing
  • Swing Nimbus look-and-feel
  • Swing JLayer component
  • The integral types (byte, short, int and long) can also be expressed using the binary number system. To specify a binary literal, add the prefix 0b or 0B to the number.
  • Any number of underscore characters (_) can appear anywhere between digits in a numerical literal. This feature enables you, for example, to separate groups of digits in numeric literals, which can improve the readability of your code.
  • You can replace the type arguments required to invoke the constructor of a generic class with an empty set of type parameters (<>) as long as the compiler can infer the type arguments from the context. This pair of angle brackets is informally called the diamond.
  • A single catch block can handle more than one type of exception. This enables you to specify more specific exception types in the throws clause of a method declaration and reduces code repetition.
  • The try with-resources statement is a try statement that declares one or more resources. A resource is an object that must be closed after the program is finished with it. The try with-resources statement ensures that each resource is closed at the end of the statement.
  • Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.4.5.

JDK 7 Release Notes

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