Java Version History - Java SE 7 (July 28, 2011)

Java SE 7 (July 28, 2011)

Java 7 (codename 'Dolphin') is a major update to Java that was launched on July 7, 2011 and was made available for developers on July 28, 2011. The development period was organized into thirteen milestones; on February 18, 2011, milestone 13 (the last milestone) was reached. On average, 8 builds (which generally included enhancements and bug fixes) were released per milestone. The feature list at the OpenJDK 7 project lists many of the feature changes.

Feature additions for Java 7 include:

• JVM support for dynamic languages, following the prototyping work currently done on the Multi Language Virtual Machine
• Compressed 64-bit pointers Available in Java 6 with -XX:+UseCompressedOops
• Small language changes (grouped under a project named Coin):

• Strings in switch
• Automatic resource management in try-statement
• Improved type inference for generic instance creation
• Simplified varargs method declaration
• Binary integer literals
• Allowing underscores in numeric literals
• Catching multiple exception types and rethrowing exceptions with improved type checking

• Concurrency utilities under JSR 166
• New file I/O library to enhance platform independence and add support for metadata and symbolic links. The new packages are java.nio.file and java.nio.file.attribute
• Library-level support for Elliptic curve cryptography algorithms
• An XRender pipeline for Java 2D, which improves handling of features specific to modern GPUs
• New platform APIs for the graphics features originally planned for release in Java version 6u10
• Enhanced library-level support for new network protocols, including SCTP and Sockets Direct Protocol
• Upstream updates to XML and Unicode

Lambda (Java's implementation of lambda functions), Jigsaw (Java's implementation of modules), and part of Coin were dropped from Java 7. Java 8 will be released with the remaining features in summer 2013.