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.