Use the latest JDK, Java7 or JDK1.7
The feature additions for Java 7
Java SE 7 (July 28, 2011)
Java 7 (codename Dolphin) is a major update to Java which was launched on July 7 of 2011 and was made available on July 28, 2011. The development period was organized into thirteen milestones; on February 18, 2011, milestone 13, the last milestone was reached. On average, 8 builds (which generally included enhancements and bug fixes) were released per milestone. The Feature list at the Open JDK 7 project lists many of the feature changes.The feature additions for Java 7
- JVM support for dynamic languages, following the prototyping work currently done on the Multi Language Virtual Machine
- Compressed 64-bit pointers Available in Java 6 with -XX:+UseCompressedOops
- Small language changes (grouped under a project named Coin):
- Strings in switch
- Automatic resource management in try-statement
- Improved type inference for generic instance creation
- Simplified varargs method invocation
- Binary integer literals
- Allowing underscores in numeric literals
- Catching multiple exception types and rethrowing exceptions with improved type checking
- Concurrency utilities under JSR 166
- New file I/O library to enhance platform independence and add support for metadata and symbolic links. The new packages are java.nio.file and java.nio.file.attribute
- Library-level support for Elliptic curve cryptography algorithms
- An XRender pipeline for Java 2D, which improves handling of features specific to modern GPUs
- New platform APIs for the graphics features originally planned for release in Java version 6u10
- Enhanced library-level support for new network protocols, including SCTP and Sockets Direct Protocol
- Upstream updates to XML and Unicode