1690 days later

Oracle finally released JDK 7.

1690 days after JDK 6 the new Java version is now available for download.
Beside some new features which will improve the productivity, it contains several enhancements for performance and integration:

• Type inference with diamont operator:

Map<string, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();

• Try-with-resources to simplify stream handling, etc:

void save(File file) throws IOException {
   try (OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file)) {
      // ...
   }
}

• Simplify exception-handling with mutli-catches:

void do() {
   try {
      // ...
   } catch (IllegalArgumentException | IllegalStateException exc ) {
      // ...
   }
}

• literal improvements
• Use String in switch-case

• There’s a new file system API based on JSR 203

Unfortunately, just 1 day after release, there are already negative headlines. The Apache Foundation reports, that some hotspot compiler optimizations produce miscompiled loops, which can cause JVM crashes.