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Oracle's JDK 7 For General Availability Coming Soon
By Joe Purcell
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-07-19
Adam Messinger, VP of Development of Oracle, describes the release of JDK 7 as more evolutionary than revolutionary. It has been almost 5 years since JDK 6 was released, which he comments has to do with business and political reasons. The new version holds valuable improvements for developers and a bright hope for future breakthroughs in the Java platform.
A full list of features is available on their website, though a few are worth mentioning. Their list of key features include modularization, multi-language support, various productivity and performance enhancements such as Project Coin, concurrency updates, new I/O APIs, and the Garbage First (G1) garbage collector.
These updates are certainly needed. The class path is dead and growing use of multiple processors demands better concurrency tools. Developers may find the I/O APIs of great benefit. As the article states, the APIs will allow for "scalable asynchronous I/O operations, socket-channel binding and configuration, and multicast datagrams." That combined with the available of concurrency is an imperative step forward in the changing development environment.
At Reinhold's presentation at the JavaOne conference he discussed the purpose of the higher level of modularity introduced in JDK 7. Java is big and fragmented and in order to solve some of these issues modularity is being introduced to increase development productivity, be able to respond to issues more quickly, and hopefully bring the Java platform into a single implementation.
Certainly it is a step forward for developers and the Java community. Though these improvements are more evolutionary than revolutionary, in the words of Reinhold, hopefully, they will lead to more rapid development and eventual revolutionary breakthroughs in the future. Check out Mark Reinhold's blog for updates and the early access download that is already available.
About the Author:
Joe Purcell is a technology virtuoso, cyberspace frontiersman, and connoisseur of Linux, Mac, and Windows alike.
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