Java 7 - it's here

JDK 7 is finally out...

...well, not yet but it will be in few days (Oracle Announces Release Date for Java 7). After Wikipedia "Java 7 (codename Dolphin) is an upcoming major update to Java, it has been launched on July 7 of 2011 and will be made available on July 28, 2011."

Here's the list of new features Java 7 will bring (consult JDK 7 project page for more details):

Features are listed in order, more or less, from lowest to highest in the overall JDK software stack.

vm	JSR 292: Support for dynamically-typed languages (InvokeDynamic)
	Strict class-file checking
lang	JSR 334: Small language enhancements (Project Coin)
core	Upgrade class-loader architecture
	Method to close a URLClassLoader
	Concurrency and collections updates (jsr166y)
i18n	Unicode 6.0
	Locale enhancement
	Separate user locale and user-interface locale
ionet	JSR 203: More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2)
	NIO.2 filesystem provider for zip/jar archives
	SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)
	SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol)
	Use the Windows Vista IPv6 stack
	TLS 1.2
sec	Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC)
jdbc	JDBC 4.1
client	XRender pipeline for Java 2D
	Create new platform APIs for 6u10 graphics features
	Nimbus look-and-feel for Swing
	Swing JLayer component
	Gervill sound synthesizer [NEW]
web	Update the XML stack
mgmt	Enhanced MBeans

For me one of the most interesting changes are "Small language enhancements" that come from project Coin.
The goal of Project Coin is to determine what set of small
language changes should be added to JDK 7. That list is:

• Strings in switch
• Binary integral literals and underscores in numeric literals
• Multi-catch and more precise rethrow
• Improved type inference for generic instance creation
  (diamond)
• try-with-resources statement
• Simplified varargs method invocation

All Java developers have waited for this moment since December 2006 when JDK 6 was released. It was the longest and the most painful release in Java history. It took almost five years to do it while for previous versions the period between releases was more or less two years. Of course, five years waiting for new Java was the effect of many factors like problems of Sun (eventually bought by Oracle), making JDK an open source project and thus opening a pandora's box of non-open source licenses, etc.

But it's finally here.

Now we'll wait for JDK 8 with lambda expressions that were supposed to be delivered in version 7 but actually it's good that JDK guys decided to postpone some features to finally release it.

Enjoy and celebrate the new JDK 7.