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Java 7 Roundup (May 21st)

21 May 2007

This is a weekly update on new Java 7 information. All current and previous information is maintained on my Java 7 page.

General Discussion

This is a bit bigger roundup than usual as I was in Florida for vacation last week and gloriously offline. Although, a week with three small children makes me glad that I’m back at work where I can relax for a change…

There is also a lot of info in this roundup coming out of JavaOne. I’m sure I’ll have a bunch of slide links to post in the near future as soon as those are released. In the meantime, I have reorganized the info on the Java 7 page to clean things up a bit and give the features a little more structure.

Perhaps the most interesting news from my perspective was the announcement regarding Ethan Nicholas’s work on the Java Kernel which has emerged as the Consumer JRE. His blog regarding the announcement and Chet Haase’s blog are great summaries of the features of this new JRE:

  • Quickstarter: radically reducing startup time for Java applications and applets
  • Java Kernel: a modularized and load-as-needed version of the JRE
  • Deployment Toolkit: easy detection and installation of the JRE
  • Installer Improvements: improved ease of use
  • Windows Graphics Performance: enable graphics acceleration for Java 2D
  • Nimbus Look & Feel: new cross-platform LAF

This is all critical, important, awesome stuff. Kudos to Ethan, Chet, and whoever else at Sun is working on making desktop and browser Java less clunky and the best possible experience. And double kudos for getting it done in Java 6 and not waiting for Java 7. On that note, this roundup and my Java 7 page are about Java 7 features, and the Java Kernel no longer qualifies, so I’m going to stop tracking it as part of the page. I’ll leave the existing section and links for posterity though.

Modularity

For JSR 277 (Java Module System), Stanley Ho has announced an open project and mailing list for JSR 277. Thanks!

There were several sessions at JavaOne on the modularity JSRs and Felipe Gaucho had some great notes from the JavaOne session on JSR 277 which are definitely worth a read.

More info: JSR 277, JSR 294

Libraries

Someone (not sure who) posted an An open letter to the JSR 310 community detailing a number of comments and requests regarding JSR 310, the new date time API.

You can find some more info on JSR 310 on the JavaOne JSR 310 BOF slides which were posted by Stephen Colebourne and Michael Santos.

More info: JSR 310

Swing

Adrian Sutton posted notes from the JSR 296 Swing Application Framework session at JavaOne. Malcolm Davis posted some requests for things that should be (but aren’t yet) in JSR 296.

Danno Ferrin posted an example of a JSR 295 beans binding builder built in Groovy, which is pretty interesting.

More info: JSR 296, JSR 295

JMX

Lucas Jellema wrote a very thorough post on JMX 2.0 (JSR 255) following the JavaOne session. And Daniel Fuchs announced the open-sourcing of the OpenDMK project, which implements cascading, a key feature of JMX 2.0.

Daniel Fuchs also posted on JMX integration with non-Java technologies via the web services connector (JSR 262).

More info: JSR 255, JSR 262

Generics and Types

Neal Gafter had an interesting post on the limitations of Super Type Tokens triggered by something he saw in Josh Bloch’s puzzler talk at JavaOne.

More info: Type Literals

Language Proposals

There were a bunch of interesting items on closures in the last couple weeks:

With respect to Java property support, Rémi Forax updated his property syntax proposal and provided some prototype support as well.

More info: Closures, Property support

JVM

Charles Nutter of JRuby fame posted a wrap-up of the JSR 292 Summit at JavaOne.

More info: invokedynamic