This article completes my introduction to new Java language features introduced in Project Coin, the JDK 7 language update. So far I have introduced try-with-resources, switch-on-string, multi-catch, and final re-throw. This month I demonstrate enhancements found in the remaining four features, namely binary literals, underscores in numeric literals, type inference changes, and simplified varargs method invocation. I’ll provide an overview of each new feature and demonstrate how it is used in a small Java application example. Where appropriate I’ll also discuss performance and other improvements over prior implementations.
