New Features in Java 5
The new Java 5 release introduces a number of significant Java language enhancements: generics, typesafe enums, autoboxing, an enhanced “for” loop, a static import facility, and a general-purpose metadata facility. This talk gives an overview of the changes and helps you understand what all the funny new syntax means.
The main new language topics covered:
Generics, also called “parameterized types”, which let you specify the type of objects used in a collection, among many other things.
Autoboxing, that lets you implicitly convert from primitives to reference types, and vice-versa.
An Enhanced For Loop, that lets you iterate over arrays or collections with half the code as before.
Typesafe Enums, to create object-oriented, extensible enumerated values.
Static Imports, to put into scope static methods and fields.
Varargs, that allows methods to accept an arbitrary number of parameters.
A Metadata Facility, allowing decoration to classes and methods for later tool consumption. Covered in more depth in the “Java Metadata” talk.
Random new Library Features, like the ability to control external process launching, output formatting, and input scanning.
This talk describes the proposed changes and shows how they work together to improve the Java language. We also take breaks to see how closely Java matches the C# designs!
Attendees are assumed to be competent Java programmers.
About Jason Hunter
Jason Hunter is Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. He's probably best known as the author of “Java Servlet Programming” (O'Reilly Media). He's also an Apache Member and as Apache's representative on the Java Community Process Executive Committee he established a landmark agreement allowing open source Java. He's publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributer to Apache Tomcat (and Apache Ant committer), the creator of the JDOM open source project, a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and was recently appointed Sun Java Champion. In 2003, he received the Oracle Magazine Author of the Year award, and in both 2005 and 2006, the JavaOne Outstanding Talk award. His largest audience was 15,000 at a JavaOne conference keynote.
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