2.  No move to Java 7 until end of this year  IT deploy Java 7 everywhere  BE/CO remove it again!  So don’t rely on it being installed on a console  ‘free’ support for Java 1.6 stops this summer  Have to pay afterwards  We can’t specify 1.7 in our JNLP files a JaWS would need internet access to download 1.7 JRE  Many other new features, but I’ll outline what was interesting for me…

3.  Just like primitive switch()  switch (dayOfWeekArg) { case "Monday": …  Java compiler generates generally more efficient bytecode from switch statements that use String objects than from chained if-then- else statements

4.  int toto4 = 5_______2;  Why? Readability!  Not everywhere though  3_.1415 <- Not next to a decimal point  999_99_9999_L <- Not next to F or L suffix  52_ <- Not at the end of a literal  0_x45 <- Can’t separate 0x!  Rule is that if it doesn’t make it more readable, it’s invalid!

5.  Now we can have literals expressed in binary  0b or 0B prefix (like 0x/0X for hex)  0b00110001  This can make bit patterns much easier to understand than using hexadecimal for example  Same rules for 64 bits apply as decimal  0b10100001010001011010000101000101101000010100 01011010000101000101L

6.  Typing reduced  Map > myMap = new HashMap >();  …becomes…  Map > myMap = new HashMap<>();  Compiler knows what it’s expecting so infers it automatically!

7.  Often several exceptions are thrown from a single call to a method  Java 7 allows you to ‘OR’ the exceptions in the catch statement  try{…}catch (IOException|SQLException ex) { }  Also, you can promote a class to a subclass in the throws declaration  Void toto(String s) throws AEx, BEx { try { //... } catch (Exception e) { throw e; } }  The compiler checks that e is indeed of type Aex or Bex  This is really useful when catching many exceptions (generically) and rethrowing them with more inclusive type checking

8.  You can now ‘monitor’ files or directories  Can be used as a handy inter-process- communication mechanism  Used in FESA 3 Navigator (using 3 rd party library at the moment)  ‘notify me when a new file appears in a directory’  Uses native system calls (ReadDirectoryChangesW / iNotify on Windows / Linux)  On other platforms falls back to polling

9.  Very poor info prior to Java 7  Metadata (size, owner, creation time, etc)  Also isSymbolicLink(Path)isSymbolicLink(Path)  ?etPosixFilePermissions(Path, LinkOption...) ?etPosixFilePermissions(Path, LinkOption...)  … + a lot more attributes depending on file system (windows, posix etc)  Can now give much better error messages when something goes wrong with a file access  Previously you just got ‘false’ when trying to do many file operations!  File systems info as well

10.  Previously it was very cumbersome to intialise Lists/Sets/Maps etc.  Inialising Lists  List list = ["item"];  Accessing Lists  String item = list[0];  Initializing Sets  Set set = {"item"};  Maps…  Map map = {"key" : 1}; int value = map["key"];  Etc…  Result is much less code and typing!

11.  We should take care not to use any new features in Java 7 if we intend to use in CCC  We _could_ use from our terminal servers  Main benefits are for IO (Sockets, NIO.2 not in detail here)  But lots of nice language modifications  Less typing!  We now wait for CO!