Java 7 is now available

You can now finally use a string in a switch statement, hurray (it's the little things that make me happy)!<p><a href="http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/language/strings-switch.html" rel="nofollow">http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/la...</a>

InvokeDynamic is a pretty awesome new feature in JDK7 and will likely be tranformative for dyanmic languages on the JVM. For my mustache.java templating solution it increased performance on an integration benchmark by 25%.<p><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/mustachejava/browse_thread/thread/24b6c59d2ea55f04" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/mustachejava/browse_thread/th...</a>

Did they always have this clause in the Java license, or is it new to Oracle's release?<p>"These Supplemental License Terms add to or modify the terms of the Binary Code License Agreement....<p>A. COMMERCIAL FEATURES. You may not use the Commercial Features for running Programs, Java applets or applications in your internal business operations or for any commercial or production purpose, or for any purpose other than as set forth in Sections B, C, D and E of these Supplemental Terms. If You want to use the Commercial Features for any purpose other than as permitted in this Agreement, You must obtain a separate license from Oracle."<p>Sections mentioned are: B. SOFTWARE INTERNAL USE FOR DEVELOPMENT LICENSE GRANT. ... Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce internally and use internally the Software complete and unmodified for the purpose of designing, developing, and testing your Programs.<p>C. LICENSE TO DISTRIBUTE SOFTWARE. ... Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce and distribute the Software, provided that (i) you distribute the Software complete and unmodified and only bundled as part of, and for the sole purpose of running, your Programs, (ii) the Programs add significant and primary functionality to the Software, (iii) you do not distribute additional software intended to replace any component(s) of the Software, (iv) you do not remove or alter any proprietary legends or notices contained in the Software, (v) you only distribute the Software subject to a license agreement that: (a) is a complete, unmodified reproduction of this Agreement; or (b) protects Oracle's interests consistent with the terms contained in this Agreement and that includes the notice ...<p>D. LICENSE TO DISTRIBUTE REDISTRIBUTABLES. ... Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce and distribute those files specifically identified as redistributable in the README File ("Redistributables") ...<p>E. DISTRIBUTION BY PUBLISHERS. This section pertains to your distribution of the JavaTM SE Development Kit Software with your printed book or magazine ....<p>Maybe I'm reading too much into it, because of the Android lawsuit?

Meh. The world turns. I spent a decade developing primarily in Java, and the last few years were really disappointing. The community splintered, the language and platform really lost any ability to maintain momentum. I might have been stoked about Java 7 three years ago (when it should have come out).

Looks like this version is not open source. Is there an open-source version of Java 7? Edit: Yes! <a href="http://openjdk.java.net/" rel="nofollow">http://openjdk.java.net/</a> has an announcement at <a href="http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/announce/2011-July/000106.html" rel="nofollow">http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/announce/2011-July/00...</a>. So why would anybody "accept the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement for Java SE"?

There is a good amount of <i>stuff</i> to get excited about in this release.<p><pre><code> - Try-with-resources-Catch-Block [0] - Fork/Join libraries from Doug Lea (author of Executor framework) [1] - Inferred/Simpler generics in declarations (should have been in Java 5) - NIO2, brand new/robust filesystem APIs [2] - NIO2, treat ZIP/JAR files like directories of files for R/W [3] - SDP support [4] - String-in-switch (NOTE: check on performance implications of this for tight loops) NOTE: Read through "COMPILATION" section here for details [6] - Elliptic curve cryptography (when normal curves just don't cut it) - Underscores in numbers (e.g. int million = 1_000_000;) - XRender pipeline on Linux (Swing/Java2D rendering get a big boost) - New sound synthesizer (replaces a proprietary lib that wasn't OS) - XML stack finally got updated across the board. - InvokeDynamic (already talked about numerous times below) - Other Swing stuff I'm not all that pumped about. </code></pre> I think the most exciting items are:<p><pre><code> 1. Try-with-resources 2. NIO2 filesystem API 3. InvokeDynamic </code></pre> Features that got pushed to 8 (next year) that will be really exciting:<p><pre><code> - Modular programming (super packages? think OSGi-lite) - Syntactic Sugar: Collection literals List&#60;String&#62; people = {"Frank", "Mary", "Satan"}; - Closures - Modularization of the JDK (JDK gets broken into core modules) </code></pre> And one that I can't get confirmation on if it's in 7 or got pushed, index-access for List and Maps [5]:<p><pre><code> - List&#60;String&#62; people = {"Frank", "Mary", "Satan"}; System.out.println("Hello " + people[0]); </code></pre> I understand that a lot of people don't find Java sexy any more, that is understandable, it has become a platform for what seems like a lot of next-series of languages.<p>That being said, I've been working with Java since 1998 and still love it. I know people get a big kick out of writing code with no exception handlers and no curly braces, and programming <i>is</i> a creative/artistic process so you have to do what feels good... but none of that stuff ever bothered me.<p>I like being a pedantic programmer.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/07/java-7-try-with-resources-explained.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/07/java-7-try-with-resourc...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://artisans-serverintellect-com.si-eioswww6.com/default.asp?W9" rel="nofollow">http://artisans-serverintellect-com.si-eioswww6.com/default....</a><p>[2] <a href="http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f250" rel="nofollow">http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f250</a><p>[3] <a href="http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#fa537814" rel="nofollow">http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#fa537814</a><p>[4] <a href="http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f639" rel="nofollow">http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f639</a><p>[5] <a href="http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-March/001108.html" rel="nofollow">http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-March/0...</a><p>[6] <a href="http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-February/000001.html" rel="nofollow">http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-Februar...</a>

So for languages like Clojure,Scala does this offer any new feature for them?

«JSR TBD: Project Lambda Lambda expressions (informally, "closures") and defender methods for the Java programming language»<p>Welcome to the sixties, Java!<p>Sorry, I couldn't help it &#62;:D

Does it come with more patents? Serious question.<p>I'm thinking Oracle tried to put a lot more locks on this version of Java, to make it <i>theirs</i>, and not so open source anymore.

Watch out for the Commercial Features as defined in table 1.1 of this document <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/java-se-product-editions-397069.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/...</a><p>Commercial Features appears to be jRockit technology.

Anyone know why an OS X release is not on the list?

I'm glad to see it's finally available.<p>I'm especially happy to see some of the language syntax that makes your standard try/catch/finally blocks a little cleaner and less error prone.

Too little to show for 5 years.

Having created several "enterprise" systems in Java, I'm now looking into Mono, because there are some aspects of Java that I'm simply tired of having to deal with again and again. So far it looks very interesting and it works really well on Linux and OS X. Anyone here got experience with using Mono (and possibly Fluent NHibernate, WCF, ASP.NET MVC, etc) in the "enterprise" environment?

Does anyone have a link to the changelog?

<a href="http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/lucene-java-user/201107.mbox/%3C001601cc4d6b$37618880$a6249980$@apache.org%3E" rel="nofollow">http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/lucene-java-user/20...</a><p>that worried me little bit. what do you think ?

Making sure that the people excited about Java 7 wait until this gets patched <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820204" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820204</a>

Good for Oracle. There are (reasonable) concerns about their ownership of Java, but at least it's moving forward again.

A great release (professionally handled by Oracle), but still I am waiting for Java 8 (esp. closures + modules)

Have anyone done any performance comparison with the openjdk yet? GC related tests would be of high interest :)

Pity though that Swing didn't get much love in this release. But I guess that's the course of things.

Awesome IO stuff - finally we have great cross platform file handling.

Awesome, so java finally has closures &#38; lambdas?

closures yet?

oh man, can't wait to use closures in my Java code

Excellent. Looking forward to the memory enhancements that should help make Minecraft servers less of a hog :)

Too little, too late.