Java 6 vs Java 7

Java 6:

- Support for older win9x versions dropped.

- Scripting lang support: Generic API for integration with scripting languages, & built-in mozilla javascript rhino integration

- Dramatic performance improvements for the core platform, and swing.

- Improved web service support through JAX-WS JDBC 4.0 support

- Java compiler API: an API allowing a java program to select and invoke a java compiler programmatically.

- Upgrade of JAXB to version 2.0: including integration of a stax parser.

- Support for pluggable annotations

- Many GUI improvements, such as integration of swing worker in the API, table sorting and filtering, and true swing double-buffering (eliminating the gray-area effect).

Java 7:

- Upgrade class-loader architecture: A method that frees the underlying resources, such as open files, held by a URLClassLoader

- Concurrency and collections updates: A lightweight fork/join framework, flexible and reusable synchronization barriers, transfer queues, concurrent linked double-ended queues, and thread-local pseudo-random number generators.

- Internationalization Upgrade: Upgrade on Unicode 6.0, Locale enhancement and Separate user locale and user-interface locale.

- More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2), NIO.2 filesystem provider for zip/jar archives, SCTP, SDP, TLS 1.2 support.

- Security & Cryptography implemented Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC).

- Upgrade to JDBC 4.1 and Rowset 1.1.

- XRender pipeline for Java 2D, Create new platform APIs for 6u10 graphics features, Nimbus look-and-feel for Swing, Swing JLayer component, Gervill sound synthesizer.

- Upgrade the components of the XML stack to the most recent stable versions: JAXP 1.4, JAXB 2.2a, and JAX-WS 2.2.

- Enhanced MBeans." Support for dynamically-typed languages (InvokeDynamic): Extensions to the JVM, the Java language, and the Java SE API to support the implementation of dynamically-typed languages at performance levels near to that of the Java language itself

- Strict class-file checking: Class files of version 51 (SE 7) or later must be verified with the typechecking verifier; the VM must not fail over to the old inferencing verifier.

- Small language enhancements (Project Coin): A set of small language changes intended to simplify common, day-to-day programming tasks: Strings in switch statements, try-with-resources statements, improved type inference for generic instance creation ("diamond"), simplified varargs method invocation, better integral literals, and improved exception handling (multi-catch).

Resource Link:

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