New Features Of JDK 7

With JDK 7 out the door, many writeups of the release have naturally focused on its larger features like Project Coin, NIO.2, the fork/join framework, and invokedynamic. However, there are a number of small but useful library conveniences in JDK 7 that shouldn't be overlooked.

• To allow more informative assertion errors to be constructed, AssertionError now includes a constructor taking a string message and a Throwable cause, which is one of the four conventional constructors for exception types.
• The methods which convert strings to numeric values differed in whether or not a leading plus, "+", was regarded as valid input. Float, Double, and BigDecimal accepted a leading plus while Byte, Short, Integer, Long, and BigInteger did not. As of JDK 7, all those types consistently accept a leading plus in their parseFoo, valueOf, and decode methods.
• To help write more efficient comparators, Boolean, Byte, Character, Short, Integer, and Long each have a two-argument static compare method that performs the desired comparison operation without boxing overhead.
• This six checked exception types that can be thrown by core reflection now have a common supertype, ReflectiveOperationException. This additional type complements the improved exception handling available with multi-catch and more precise re-throw from Project Coin.
• The java.util.Objects class contains a number of small, but commonly used methods, many of them for coping with null inputs. For example, Objects contains a two-argument static equals method which does the right thing on null inputs. I've replaced a half-dozen copies of that method's logic in the JDK; I'm sure many more instances can be removed in other code bases as JDK 7 is adopted.
• Part of NIO.2, I expect over time the utility methods in java.nio.file.Files to copy, read, and write the contents of file will see heavy usage.

And To recall, these are the list of feature which we discussed :-

• Modularity
• Multi-Language Support
• New Garbage Collector
• NIO.2 New File System API
• Additional Swing API

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