What's New in Java 7?

Last week JDK 7 reached its Feature Complete milestone, and Oracle is confident they will ship the General Availability release in the summer of 2011. So what's new in Java 7?

• JSR 203: More New I/O APIs (Asynchronous I/O) for the Java Platform ("NIO.2")
• JSR 292: Add a new bytecode, invokedynamic, that supports efficient and flexible execution of method invocations in the absence of static type information. (I wonder if this will boost performance of invoking Java objects from CFML?)
• JSR 334: Small Enhancements to the Java Programming Language (OpenJDK Project Coin). Allows for using String in switch, improvements to exception handling, and more.
• Thread-safe concurrent class loaders (This may be good for Mark Mandel's JavaLoader project)
• Unicode 6.0
• Enhanced locale support (IETF BCP 47 and UTR 35)
• TLS 1.2
• Elliptic-curve cryptography
• JDBC 4.1
• Translucent and shaped windows
• Heavyweight/lightweight component mixing
• Swing Nimbus look-and-feel
• Swing JLayer component
• Concurrency API's - Java SE 7 will add new concurrency APIs developed by Prof. Doug Lea at Oswego and the JSR 166 community. These include, in particular, a Fork/Join Framework which can adaptively scale some types of application code to the available number of processors.

There will also be enhancements made to existing features:

• JSR 901: Java Language Specification ? Maintenance Review to incorporate fixes since Java SE 5.0 and changes from the above JSRs
• JSR 924: JVM Specification ? Maintenance Review to incorporate changes made in Java SE 6.0 and JSR 292
• Java SE APIs ? Maintenance Review to incorporate changes made by routine maintenance and small-scale enhancement
• JSR 199: Java Compiler API
• JSR 206: Java API for XML Processing (JAXP)
• JSR 222: Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB)
• JSR 224: Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS)
• JSR 269: Pluggable Annotation-Processing API

For more details on the Java 7 release checkout JSR-336.