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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."
It's just improvements to the I/O API. Java has the New IO API for doing I/O. java 7 has extended it, hence NIO2. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-nio2-1/?ca=drs-
Ah yes. The old "blame the language for the lack of a developer's skills" ploy. It's a sad carpenter who blames his tools for his incompetence. It's a sadder carpenter who blames a tool for other carpenters' incompetence.
Just curious: what do you think all those "Java weenies who couldn't code themselves out of a paper sack" would do if Java died. Would they magically become skilled code gurus because Java doesn't exist? Or would they be incompetent coders in a different language?
As Dilbert so succinctly put it: you're solving the wrong problem!
While you are busy being a jackass and letting us all know you have never made a single mistake EVER with resource allocation, some of us have work to do and enjoy the fact that we will never have to type try{openFile}catch(DamnException){}finally{try{closeFile}catch(AotherDamnException){}} ever again.
Yes. Let's shun all advances in programming language design, because they make it too hard to use languages without them.
Man, imagine what'd happen if you ever ran into a programming language with a good design. There are some out there that are actually pretty good. Of course, no language is perfect - or even close. But people who resist making things better just because it makes defects in existing languages more obvious is doing themselves, and the entire field of software engineering, a disservice.
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.