The Project Coin Changes Accepted for JDK 7

Joe Darcy, the lead for Project Coin, has posted the proposals that have been accepted for inclusion in JDK 7. From the 70 or so proposals submitted it was expected that only five would make it (although on closer inspection it turns out to be seven). The goal of the small language changes proposed in Project Coin are to make everyday programming easier and to support other platform changes due in JDK 7.

The proposals accepted are:

• Strings in switch statements.
• Improved type inference for generic instance creation.
• Automatic resource management.
• Simplified varargs method invocation.
• Better integer literals.
• Language support for collections.
• Language support for JSR 292: VM support for non-Java languages.

It looks like some of the changes that you might have seen in the deep dives in JDK 7 with Danny Coward webcast are not going to make it. For example, the Elvis operator and improved exception handling.