Java 7 is the seventh major release of the Java language, runtime and compiler. Marketing people and book authors refer to it as Java 7. Technical people call it Java 1.7. It has a number of new features, most minor tweakings to the Java syntax.
- You can use understores in numeric literals to break them up to make them more readable and proofreadable. The compiler ignores them.
- The diamond operator means you can often leave out generic types on the right hand side. They are infered from the left hand side.
- You can use Strings as case labels.
- You can use a single catch to handle several exceptions.
- You can treat a zip file as if it were a directory tree.
- Resources that implement java.lang.AutoCloseable can be automatically closed no matter what by declaring them in the try statement.
- NIO now handles symbolic links and works more consistently across OSes.
- WatchService lets you be notified if someone changes a directory or file.
- ForkJoinPool makes it easier to spread the workload over several cores.
- The JVM now has features to support dynamically typed languages.
- Support for Unicode 6
- binary literals
- No longer need CODEBASE in JNLP
- Support for SSL/TLS 1.2
- You can emebed the entire JNLP file in the HTML Applet tag, Base-64 encoded.
- Enhanced java.util.Currency to handle international currencies using ISO 4217 codes