The Java 7 Thread

Hey guys,

As you're probably aware, Java 7 releases today. I'm curious to see what people think of it.

I must admit that I'm not extremely excited by many of the changes, but a few things do look interesting, even if I don't know what I'd use them for just yet. The File stuff opens up some cool application potential. Just glancing at the release notes, I'm going to look into JLayer a bit more, I'm not sure what it's even for. And I bet people will be happy with the shaped and translucent windows- I wonder what kind of weird effects people are going to pull off with that.

Anyway, I don't have a chance to test it myself just yet (work is going to be slow to adopt it, and I don't have a need for any of it in my current pet project at home. But I'd love to hear some first impressions and what you guys think of it.

Oh, and here are some useful links I found (more might pop up later, I think it might still be too early for the release to have actually happened yet).

Java Early Access Downloads
Java SE 7 - Help us test the Developer Preview — Java.net

There will be a webcast introducing Java 7 today. Details here: Java 7 webcast

I am yet to play with Java 7 but it's definitely something I will be doing over the next few weeks.

Combined with the new Eclipse release it's quite exciting :)

I can't wait to try out the Gervill sound synthesizer

Had a chance to watch most of the presentations yesterday. Some very interesting discussions came up. While there aren't too many eye popping additions, for me a few the biggest are a) Fork/Join framework for parallel processing and b) invoke_dynamic in the jvm. Another interesting topic discussed in the roundtable was where Swing is headed, in particular the role JavaFX has for the future - which would be fantastic in my opinion, although the current platform dependence of JavaFX has prevented me from going far with the framework in its current state (I can understand how big an undertaking like this is and the difficulties getting a platform independent framework deployed)