Pinderkent

I recently saw an article about the accepted Project Coin changes that are planned to be included in JDK 7. This is some good news for the Java community. After a relatively long period of stagnation concerning the evolution of the Java language, and some fierce competition from C#, these are the sort of practical changes we need to see.

Most of these proposed changes aren't exactly revolutionary. Several of them have already been implemented for some time in C# and other .NET-based languages. They've proven to be effective there, and will hopefully bring the same benefits to Java.

The Automatic Resource Management proposal is a good example of a feature that is badly needed in Java. The using statement of C#, and the Using statement of VB.NET, have proven this concept. They make it safe and easy to ensure that certain non-memory resources are disposed of appropriately. This is exactly the sort of practical language-level change that Java needs.

The Strings in Switch proposal is another one that suggests a very useful change. Not being able to use a switch statement to select a case based on a string value has always been an annoyance to me.

The Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation proposal may help making coding quicker, although I'm not convinced it's as beneficial as it sounds. Although it reduces what some may consider to be redundancy in code, most decent Java IDEs offer auto-completion support that helps prevent a programmer from actually typing out the parameterized types. And we do lose some detail within the object instantiation code, which otherwise is self-documenting in some sense. I think the benefits of this change will require some experimentation once an implementation is available.

Some of the other proposed changes, such as the addition of language support for JSR 292 and the collection-related changes don't seem as sensible to me. In the case of adding more support to the JVM and the Java language for supporting dynamically typed languages, I think this is a bad idea. The JVM itself is better suited to statically typed languages, and trying to hack on support for dynamically typed languages may just result in further bloat.

In the case of the collection-related changes, we are getting to the point where a major reworking of the collection classes is in order. We already have older classes like java.util.Hashtable and java.util.Vector, as well as the Java Collections Framework, and then all the changes that were made to both groups during the introduction of generics with Java 5. Trying to further build on the existing mess may just make the situation worse. But a clean up would be massive, and would have many repercussions on existing software. So there may be no easy answer here.

The acceptance of these proposals is a very good sign. They show the sort of activity and change needed to keep the Java programming language and platform relevant in the face of numerous other competing programming languages and platforms. I do hope that we get to see these implemented in JDK 7, as some of them do sound to be practical and badly needed by Java developers.