Oracle releases Java 7 release candidate

BANGALORE, INDIA: Oracle has finally announced the availability of first release candidate of Java Standard Edition 7 to the Java developer community.

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"After an initial round of testing we've declared build 147 to be the first Release Candidate of JDK 7," said Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Platform Group in a blog post.

There are only thirteen changes in this build, said Reinhold.

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Over half of them are administrivial updates that don’t affect the actual code; the remainder are true showstoppers, including several hard VM crashes and a JIT cor­rectness bug identified by an Eclipse unit test, added Reinhold.

With the developer preview of Java SE 7, the company claims, it has reached the milestone (M12).

Reinhold further added that this release is feature complete, stable, and ready for testing. We would like to enlist you to download and test this release!

Next: New features of Java 7..!

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New features of Java 7 includes:

* JSR 292: Support for dynamically-typed languages (InvokeDynamic)

* Strict class-file checking

* JSR 334: Small language enhancements (Project Coin)

* Upgrade class-loader architecture

* Method to close a URLClassLoader

* Concurrency and collections updates (jsr166y)

* Unicode 6.0

* Locale enhancement

* Separate user locale and user-interface locale

* JSR 203: More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2) (turorial on File I/O)

* NIO.2 filesystem provider for zip/jar archives

* SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)

* SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol)

* Use the Windows Vista IPv6 stack

* TLS 1.2

* Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC)

* JDBC 4.1

* XRender pipeline for Java 2D

* Create new platform APIs for 6u10 graphics features

* Nimbus look-and-feel for Swing

* Swing JLayer component

* Update the XML stack

* Enhanced JMX Agent and MBeans

The first general release of Java 7 will be on July 28.oracle