New Feature in JDK7

There haven't any changes to the Java language since J2SE 5.0 in 2004 . But there are several planned for JDK 7, coming from a variety of sources (sic). Here's a quick summary:


1) Module support . Known historially as superpackages , though they are assuredly not , this promises to sit atop a variety of module systems to let developers partition big chunks of code more effectively .

2) Type Annotations . Step three in the popular annotations program , this hopes to further extend the reach of attaching meta-data to Java code by letting developers put it in more places .

3) And of course, Project Coin . The small useful changes to soothe away some of the common irritations with the langauge. The most likely handful have been picked (Strings in switch , improved exception handling , ARM blocks , improved type inference , Null safe operators , and simplified varargs ), and there's another handful going through the mangle . Including some rather interesting ones for developers hoping to use JSR 292 to implement (better, faster...) a dynamic language on the JVM .