Letโs go through the history of changes done in different versions of java. In this section we will see the new changes with respect to each version of Java so our title will be โJava Features Before Java8โ.
Table of Contents (Click on links below to navigate)
Why new version?
The Java community has launched new versions of java periodically to provide following benefits to java users/developers. These are :
- More functionality in less code
- To make development fast
- To make code easily readable, understandable & maintainableย
New Java Features Before Java 8 versions:
Up to version 1.4 : Objective was to do API level Changes
From version 1.5 onward : Language level target, less programs, main focus was on collection APIs
Jdk 1.0 to J2SE 1.4 :=========
โฆ Jdk 1.0 ( Jan23, 1996 ) : Basic language features with APIs
โฅ Jdk 1.1ย (Feb 19, 1997 ) : Inner classes, JDBC, Java Beans
โฆ J2SE 1.2 (Dec8, 1998 ) : strictfp keyword, Collection API, Reflection API, JIT compiler
โฅ J2SE 1.3 (May 8, 2000) : Hotspot JVM, JNDI API
โฆ J2SE 1.4 (Feb 6, 2002)ย : Assert statements, Exception Chaining,Regular Expressions, XML Parsers(DOM,SAX)
Java 5.0 :(Sep 30, 2004): ===========
โฆ static imports
โฅ @Override annotation
โฆ Covariant Returns
โฅ Auto-boxing and auto-Unboxing
โฆ Var-arg length methods
โฅ Enhanced for loop
โฆ Generic Types
โฅ enum (Enumerated types)
โฆ Annotations -Meta data
โฅ C style formatted Input and Output
โฆ Scanner class
โฅ Queue type collection classes
โฆ java.util.concurrency package
Java 6 :(Dec 11, 2006): ===========
โฅ Console
โฆ NavigableSet
โฅ NavigableMap
Java 7 :(Jul 28, 2011): ===========
โฆ class execution change with respect to Main Method
โฆ Binary literals
โฅ Numeric Literals with underscore
โฅ switch with String type argument
โฆ try-with-resource statement
โฆ catch block with multiple exception handling syntax
โฅ Var-arg bug fix in overloading & overriding
โฅ Improved Auto-boxing casting
โฆ Type inference for Generics
So this is the history of โJava Features Before Java8โ where we have seen the features of versions before java 8..
Java 8 :(Mar 18, 2014) : ===
Explained in separate section as Java 8 Features
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