Matt O’ Rama

Java 7 Announcements – Finally!

Java 7 Update from Mark Reinhold at Devoxx

That link has the full list of announcements of stuff that will be in Java 7. This isn’t everything but it’s a good list. Here’s my favorites:

What will be in

• Modularization – 294 and project Jigsaw

Cool.

• 292 – JVM Support for dynamic languages

Yay!

• Null dereference expressions – Null checks with ‘?’ syntax similar to Groovy… lettingn developers avoid a nest of null checks.

This is objectively awesome. Less code is a big win.

• Multi-catch – (yes!) allows a comma seperated list of disjunctive exception types in catch clause.

I second the (yes!). Less code again, is win.

What will not be in

• BigDecimal syntax

Grrr. This sucks. I’ve been working on a financial system for over a year and the BigDecimal syntax is insanely painful. I’m really not happy about this.

One of the commenters on this post questions the lack of mention for JSR310 which is a revamp of the Date/Time system. I’d love to see this go in and since there’s already a great implementation in use I hope it makes it. Dates are second in my list of complaints right behind BigDecimal in terms of API confusion.

In all, I’ll be excited to see how Java 7 evolves as it comes closer. It’s still a year away probably but it’ll include some nice changes.

You should follow me on Twitter here!