Java 7 was a major release. Although most Java developers have been using the language for years, they might not be aware of some of its advanced features.
This blog post presents a list of advanced Java 7 features and explains why they should be used. It covers features such as using fork/join to parallelize work, using string in switch statement, type inference in diamond operator, try-with-resources statement, multi-catch exception handling, and binary literals.
Advanced Java 7 Features You Must Know
Java 7 has been out for several years now and the majority of developers have adopted it to build applications. As with all programming languages, there are a ton of features that you may never use, but are good to know just in case. This tutorial will cover some of the more advanced features of Java 7 and how they can be used.
Binary Literals
One of the most basic types of literals is an integer. This is represented by a sequence of numerals, such as 0, 1, 2, 3…9 and so on. In the past, this number was always assumed to be decimal unless otherwise specified. If you wanted to represent a binary number (base 2), you would have to use a “0b” prefix before your number. For example, the decimal number 15 would be represented in binary as “0b1111.” This works in every version of Java up until Java 7.
In Java 7, you can now use the digits 0 and 1 without any prefix to indicate a binary number literal. For example:
int x = 1111; //decimal 15
int y = 0b1111; //also decimal 15
Java 7 is a big release, and there are many new features one could cover. In this blog post, I try to cover a list of features that are actually useful and ready for production. It does not make sense to learn new features that do not add much value; for example, Java 7 has support for dynamically loading extensions at runtime via the ServiceLoader class. This is not a feature that will be used often in real life; in my opinion it should be covered in an interview question as opposed to an article on “new Java 7 features you must know.”
I recommend that programmers use these new features after they have been released in the real world. The reason is that sometimes the final implementation can vary significantly from their original design documents; for example, in Java 5 I have seen various implementations of autoboxing and varargs, some of which were incompatible with each other.
Without further ado, here are some of the most useful Java 7 features you should know about:
1. Support for dynamically-typed languages such as Ruby or Python via invokedynamic
2. Type inference improvements using the diamond operator <> (JSR 334)
3. Improved exception handling using multi-catch blocks (JSR 334)
4. Catching multiple
In this blog post I’m going to take a quick look at some of the more advanced features in Java 7 and why they should be used.
Java 7 is an interesting release with a lot of new features that can be hard to understand if you don’t have a good grasp on Java (especially with the introduction of lambdas). So this post is going to be a bit of an introduction to these features and what you can do with them.
1. Try-With-Resources – The last thing you want to do is forget about closing your resources, so try with resources gives you a much cleaner way of doing it.
2. ForkJoinPool – A library class providing an API that lets developers write parallel, recursive tasks in an easy manner. By default ForkJoinPool uses as many threads as there are processors available to the JVM (see Runtime.availableProcessors()).
3. Method Parameter Reflection – You can now access parameter names via reflection even if they aren’t stored in the bytecode (such as when using -g:none). This means you can use annotations on parameters for things like dependency injection and such without the need for compile time dependencies or reflection hacks.
4. New
Java 7 has been out for several years now, but there are still many programmers who have not upgraded to the latest Java release. The problem is that many developers believe that they have not really missed out on anything. Yes, there were some new language features in Java 7, but nothing as significant as generics or annotations.
While this is true in general terms, there are a handful of new Java 7 features that make the upgrade worth your while. These language and library changes are very significant and will impact your coding style once you get used to them (which will be quick). This article will introduce you to the five most significant changes in Java 7 that you really need to understand and use going forward.
1. Try-with-resources
2. String Switching
3. Numeric literals with underscores
4. Parallel Array Sorting
5. Type Inference
I have been working with Java applications for a while, and I know that the language has evolved and keeps evolving. Every version of Java yields new features, and I always like to take a look at them, learn them and use them when possible.
Java 7 was recently released, and it is packed with many new and exciting features. Here are some of the most popular ones that you must know as a Java developer.
1. The try-with-resources Statement
Java 7 has provided a new feature to handle situation where you need to perform the same task for multiple resources but only one of them will throw an exception. We can use try-with-resources statement to avoid having to write code in finally block to close the resource. This is available from JDK 7.
The try-with-resources statement is a try statement that declares one or more resources. A resource is as an object that must be closed after the program is finished with it. The try-with-resources statement ensures that each resource is closed at the end of the statement. Any object that implements java.lang.AutoCloseable, which includes all objects which implement java.io.Closeable, can be used as a resource.