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Oracle releases Java 7 SDK release cadidate
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Oracle has released the Java 7 development kit (SDK) release candidate, the first major version in five years.
Oracle's Java programming language and framework is one of the most widely used high level programming languages and Java 7 brings relatively few changes and a major version number. Arguably the biggest new feature is Java 7's Fork/Join API that should bring 'true' parallelism to Java.
Oracle also provided updates for better file access and support for dynamically typed languages, something that will raise the eyebrows and interests of programmers that use scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.
While Oracle's changes might not seem all that grand, Java developers are likely to be pleased that the first major release of Java under Oracle's stewardship doesn't result in wholesale changes to the way developers work. Oracle's chief architect of the Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold wrote in his blog, "There are only thirteen changes in this build. 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 [Just-in-time compilation] correctness bug identified by an Eclipse unit test."
Given the popularity of Java, Oracle's conservatism seems to be welcome. Al Hilwa, application development and software programme manager for analyst outfit IDC told our sister publication V3.co.uk, "When you have a language with as many developers as Java, you have to be very careful about how you evolve. It has to be evolutionary."
Oracle plans to release the final Java 7 SDK by the end of July. µ
Tags: Software
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The Fork-Join non-API is simply a proof-of-concept for the Java Fork/Join Framework paper by Doug Lea.
This article explains why:
http://www.coopsoft.com/ar/CalamityArticle.html
Sounds like those small changes are also a good target for potential exploits and crashes and lockups and data corruption, I hope the beta test process is thorough.
Parallelism has been available in Java from the off-set.
Fork/Join simply simplifies it via an API (though that's arguable too http://www.coopsoft.com/ar/CalamityArticle.html) - and this is only an extension to the concurrency stuff in Java 5.
"There are only thirteen changes in this build" surely refers not to the move from Java 6 (1.6) to 7, but to the beta versus release-candidate process. Whoops!