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Java 7: What's In It For Developers

GMGruman writes "After five years of a torturous political process and now under the new ownership of Oracle, Java SE 7 is finally out (and its initial bugs patched in the Update 1 release). So what does it actually offer? Paul Krill surveys the new capabilities that matter most for Java developers, from dynamic language support to an improved file system."

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  1. Re:Improvements by slack_justyb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Arguments for slow Java are so 1990's. Every Java application, desktop or otherwise, I have written has been very snappy, very responsive. Swing has always had places where you can get caught making your own application slow to load or slow to respond. I believe that the community and Sun have really ushered in conventions to mitigate that. SwingWorker (part of core Java Swing), Timing Framework [java.net], JPA (especially our friends at Eclipse), and other community frameworks have really changed the way coders write Java desktop applications in ways that avoid a lot of the pitfalls that came with the 1.1, 1.2 and so on versions of Java.

    I think this is the reason why Oracle really needs to embrace the community. It has been because of them that Java has gotten better and faster with each release. People who still talk about how slow Java is and how crappy Swing is, are still living in the past. Is it the perfect platform? No, but it has gotten multiple times better than where it was.