“Java SE 7 is officially released today! After nearly five years of collaboration within the worldwide Java community, Java Platform, Standard Edition is ready for download! It’s an important step in Java’s evolution. Thanks to everyone who suggested features, reviewed specs, argued on mailing lists, talked about Java 7 at your JUG meeting, submitted bugs, wrote blogs and tweeted about #java7.”
I thought it was a bit of a letdown.
It took them 5 years to get from version 6 to 7. As I don’t follow Java’s development, what took them so long?
Sun’s lack of money and resources.
A little disorientation in what features they should invest.
Political discussions inside the JCP regarding the accessibility to the TCK for open source implementations.
Sun being acquired by Oracle.
It is a long time, but actually I know of IT projects only now upgrading to Java 5 or 6. Similar cases on the .Net world with projects moving .Net 2.0 or .Net 3.0.
Many IT projects are really slow, so actually Java’s slow pace is not that bad. Developers always need time to get to know new language features and what would be the best practices.
The combination of these two… Especially features.
I think they had a chance to really evolve the language but chose the safest route. The most earth shattering new feature is the switch statement update.
I suppose performance could be a part of their decision to not support some newer concepts (like closures)… but I was really hoping for more.
First off, I think that Java has been somewhat stagnant the last couple of years, and it is good to see that something is happening again. Congratulations to the team behind the release….
BUT, reading through the release notes I find this:
Virtualization:
All supported platforms are also supported when virtualized in a supported hypervisor, except where noted. Supported hypervisors are: Oracle VM 2.2, VirtualBox 3.x, 4.x, Solaris Containers, and Solaris LDOMs.
VMware and Microsoft Hypervisor are not supported.
WTF. Are they crazy?
Missed that.
Well on my case I don’t care. I find it a bit stupid this trend nowadays of having VMs inside VMs, inside VMs…
Anyway it reminds me an issue Borland had with the Borland C++ license, where for some time they forbade buyers to use Borland C++ to developer compilers!
This was in the early 90’s. Does someone remember which version it was?
This is a thing? There are people who do this? Why?! What possible performance advantages could you get?
Or do you mean like how VMWare is a VM (hardware virtualization) and Java is a VM (software emulation)?
No I mean things like having multiple VMWare instances per blade.
With multiple instances of Websphere, Database and load balancers.
Only to save hardware costs.
Great news. Java 7 should support Linux a lot better, due to patches Red Hat and the community put in. For one, file drag and drop will finally work.
Other things to look forward to are better performance, lower memory usage on 64 bit, soft real-time garbage collection, and awesome new APIs for native file I/O, asynchronous I/O, fork/join, better exception handling (no more try/catch(IOException) to close() something cleanly), and plenty I haven’t discovered yet!
I like the native filesystem operations support via NIO2 best. Actually had a need for such a thing in one project half a year ago but solved it differently.
Although must say, that for mission critical projects I am not considering the upgrade to Java 7 for quite some time. Java 6 works very well.
UPDATE – Thats why I hold off the new Java:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Java-7-paralyses-Lucene-and-…
Quote: The hotspot compiler in the recently released Java 7 has a defective optimiser that can cause flawed loops, according to a warning published by the Apache Software Foundation. As a result, the Java Virtual Machine can crash, and calculations can produce incorrect results.
Ouch… How such a thing got through the release process…
Edited 2011-07-29 12:44 UTC
Another version or JRE and/or JDK to gunk up computers! Seriously though I wonder how backward compatible it will be.
Java isn’t bad. I don’t mean to beat up on the language at all. But, compare it to other lanugeages that don’t have quite the backing of a company such as oracle/Sun. When they release a new version, how easy is it to find a change log, or an in depth tour of the new features.
Where is any of that for Java 7? I had to go clicking through their site to just find this page:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/api-jsp…
Which has the wonderfully up-to-date notice that Java 7 is not released yet. Great jorb Sun/Oracle!
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-429209….
“Java SE downloads” –> “release notes”. Not really that hard.
I am wondering whether the new APIs will be supported on Android in the future.
Well, considering the oracle/Google lawsuit. I’d say not any time soon.
So, no closured coming to Java?
This is something that I missed some time back. Is it available yet? Or one still has to use a custom library?