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’.

Why new version?

The Java community has launched new versions of java periodically to provide following benefits to java users/developers. These are :

1. More functionality in less code
2. To make development fast
3. To make code easily readable, understandable & maintainable 

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 :=========

♦ 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 as Java 8 Features