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Java 7 Roundup (Oct 18th)

18 Oct 2007

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

Java SE 7 build 22 is now available. One change that caught my eye was this enhancement to swap out the custom thread pool in SwingWorker with an executor service. Nice to see the guts taking advantage of the new and improved APIs.

In other Java 7 news, I asked Danny Coward this week whether a Java 7 JSR was forthcoming and he said they’ve been a bit busy :) but that he hoped to spool it up soon.

Modularity

The JSR 294 spec leads posted updated docs to the expert group this week in preparation for an Early Draft Review. There were a few minor changes but didn’t sound like anything too different than the initial strawman spec.

More info: JSR 294

Libraries

There was a fair amount of discussion this week on JSR 275 (Units and Measures). The spec lead for JSR 275 (Units and Measures), Jean-Marie Dautelle, had a lengthy article introducing the API and it’s usage.

In addition, Jean-Marie and Stephen Colebourne have been having an active discussion on the JSR 310 mailing list about the notion of duration and various other aspects of the JSR 310 API and how it may intersect with JSR 275. Lots of tricky stuff around the concept of time and calendar systems!

More info: JSR 310, JSR 275

Language Proposals

The javablog had a post about several Java 7 requests:

  • operator overloading – seems highly improbable for Java 7
  • subarray notation – syntax for referencing a subarray without copying
  • terse equals notation – shorthand for defining equals methods
  • terse getter/setter notation – basically related to the property syntax idea
  • SuffixTree based regex – this would be an extension to the regex library

Some interesting ideas there.

Other languages on the JVM

John Rose had an interesting post this week on the kickoff meeting for JSR 292. It sounds to me like the scope and goals of this JSR 292 have broadened (at least from my prior understanding) to include an exploration of what can be done in the JVM to make it more attractive for dynamic languages. John has really developed some energy around this and I think this is exciting stuff. This stuff has been a little under the radar but Sun seems to be honestly enthusiastic about pushing into this area and leveraging the strengths of the JVM. I love seeing this kind of stuff happening in tandem with the activity in languages like Scala, JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, etc.

More info: invokedynamic