Let’s 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 ‘Java Features Before Java8’.
Table of Contents (Click on links below to navigate)
Why new version?
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 & maintainable
New Java Features Before Java8 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 :=========
♦ Jdk 1.0 ( Jan23, 1996 ) : Basic language features with APIs
♥ Jdk 1.1 (Feb 19, 1997 ) : Inner classes, JDBC, Java Beans
♦ J2SE 1.2 (Dec8, 1998 ) : strictfp keyword, Collection API, Reflection API, JIT compiler
♥ J2SE 1.3 (May 8, 2000) : Hotspot JVM, JNDI API
♦ J2SE 1.4 (Feb 6, 2002) : Assert statements, Exception Chaining,Regular Expressions, XML Parsers(DOM,SAX)
Java 5.0 :(Sep 30, 2004): ===========
♦ static imports
♥ @Override annotation
♦ Covariant Returns
♥ Auto-boxing and auto-Unboxing
♦ Var-arg length methods
♥ Enhanced for loop
♦ Generic Types
♥ enum (Enumerated types)
♦ Annotations -Meta data
♥ C style formatted Input and Output
♦ Scanner class
♥ Queue type collection classes
♦ java.util.concurrency package
Java 6 :(Dec 11, 2006): ===========
♥ Console
♦ NavigableSet
♥ NavigableMap
Java 7 :(Jul 28, 2011): ===========
♦ class execution change with respect to Main Method
♦ Binary literals
♥ Numeric Literals with underscore
♥ switch with String type argument
♦ try-with-resource statement
♦ catch block with multiple exception handling syntax
♥ Var-arg bug fix in overloading & overriding
♥ Improved Auto-boxing casting
♦ Type inference for Generics
So this is the history of ‘Java Features Before Java8’ where we have seen the features of versions before java 8..
Java 8 :(Mar 18, 2014) : ===Explained in separate section
