It’s really simple to make the best use of the recent changes made in Project Coin Java SE 7. Just understand the basics and you can take Java development to a whole new level with these improvements.

There are quite a few minor language changes that have taken place in Project Coin, these changes have been implemented in order to minimize the burden on developers while performing day to day development work. Just a few of the prominent changes that have taken place are

• Integral literals have been improved

• Multi-catch exceptions

• Strings in switch statements have been modified

• Varargs method invocation has been simplified

• Addition of try-with resources

• A whole new improved type inference for generic instance creation

Multi-Catch Exceptions

Each and every programmer dreamt of the day when Java development would be simpler and more concise with exceptional handling powers, finally this day has come – with the addition of Multi-catch exceptions. In order to avail the benefits of these exceptions, you’ll need to convert pre-Java SE 7 code to the new Java SE 7 code. It’s surely beneficial and easy to accomplish.

Earlier if at all you needed to have the same logic for two or three instances, such as ParseException and the IOException, you had to copy and paste the same code. This is not the ideal solution because it could produce unintended side effects. For example any code in the try block could automatically show an exception and be swallowed by a blanket catch clause. Even if an exception like a SecurityException was used it used to still catch it, however the user would never know what really happened, and therefore solving these problems was very tedious – as the cause wasn’t known. Therefore to overcome all these hurdles Java SE 7 has now come up with a multi-catch statement which allows developers to combine a whole catch clause and place it within a single block of code, therefore solving plenty of the earlier problems.

Re-Throwing Exceptions

Whilst working on exception handling, we often come across instances wherein we need to re-throw an exception that we previously handled. A basic java programmer may try to use simple codes to achieve this, as they won’t be aware of the complex codes needed; however this updated version of Java SE 7 has made it simpler to actually catch the original exception.

Try-with-Resources

In the older versions of java, cleanup was either hard to handle or couldn’t be used at all within the try block, but with the advanced version i.e. Java SE 7, you could easily use cleanup. The updated syntax allows you to display resources that form a part of the ‘try’ block. This means the resources can be specified in advance and the run time closes those resources automatically after the try block is executed.

Review

The new changes implemented in Java SE 7 don’t just allow you to program more concisely, but also give you examples in the multi-catch area so as to help you program with ease and efficiency.