Before JDK 7’s debut, Oracle invited the Java community to submit proposals for new language features to its Project Coin mailing list. The open call ran for one month and nearly 70 proposal forms were submitted. Eight features were then selected for inclusion in JDK 7:
- Automatic resource management (try-with-resources)
- Switch-on-string
- Multi-catch
- Final re-throw
- Binary literals
- Underscores in numeric literals
- Type inference changes
- Simplified varargs method invocation
This installment in the Essential Java language features tour addresses the first four small language features from that list — try-with-resources, switch-on-string, multi-catch, and final re-throw. I’ll address the remaining four features in a follow-up article.
