You may be interested in some new developments in JSR-666 (the JSR from hell). This is an excellent JSR containing many important enhancements for Java. Maybe we can even get it into Java 7.

This JSR contains the following list of recommendations:

• Import on Demand, With Extreme Prejudice. You can get rid of all those pesky imports and instead them with a simple: “import *;”.
• Default throws Clause. Treat an omitted throws clause as if “throws Exception” was declared.
• Eliminate NullPointerExceptions. Remove null and require that all variables have a valid value.
• Extended Operator Set. Why waste all those Unicode characters? For example, ∞ should be BigInteger.MAX_INT. Some updates can be found on the post-assignment operator as well.
• The ‘that’ keyword. For referencing objects that don’t exist yet, did exist but were GC’ed, etc.
• SchrödingerException. An exception for dealing with the case where both IllegalArgumentException and NullPointerException seem like good choices. This exception can exist as either till a point where the exception is caught, at which time it collapses to one or the other.

Many props to the JSR 666 expert group: Alan Green, Charles Miller, Mike Cannon-Brookes, and AJ Fitzpatrick.

Originally posted on the Java Zone.