A popular interview question in java is “what is new in Java version X?”. Is that an intelligent question is debatable. I have summarized below important new features added in each major java release till now. I target to highlight important features added in respective release.

Java Versions and History

Apart from below list of features, every release has enhancements and lots of bug fixes.

Java SE 8


Java 8 was released on 18 March 2014. The code name culture is dropped with Java 8 and so no official code name going forward from Java 8.

New features in Java SE 8

  • Lambda Expressions
  • Pipelines and Streams
  • Date and Time API
  • Default Methods
  • Type Annotations
  • Nashhorn JavaScript Engine
  • Concurrent Accumulators
  • Parallel operations
  • PermGen Error Removed
  • TLS SNI

Java Version SE 7


Code named Dolphin and released on July 28, 2011.


New features in Java SE 7

  • Strings in switch Statement
  • Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation
  • Multiple Exception Handling
  • Support for Dynamic Languages
  • Try with Resources
  • Java nio Package
  • Binary Literals, underscore in literals
  • Diamond Syntax
  • Automatic null Handling

Java Version SE 6


Code named Mustang and released on December 11, 2006.



New features in Java SE 6

  • Scripting Language Support
  • JDBC 4.0 API
  • Java Compiler API
  • Pluggable Annotations
  • Native PKI, Java GSS, Kerberos and LDAP support.
  • Integrated Web Services.
  • Lot more enhancements.

J2SE Version 5.0


Code named Tiger and released on September 30, 2004.



New features in J2SE 5.0

  • Generics
  • Enhanced for Loop
  • Autoboxing/Unboxing
  • Typesafe Enums
  • Varargs
  • Static Import
  • Metadata (Annotations)
  • Instrumentation

J2SE Version 1.4


Code named Merlin and released on February 6, 2002 (first release under JCP).


New features in J2SE 1.4

  • XML Processing
  • Java Print Service
  • Logging API
  • Java Web Start
  • JDBC 3.0 API
  • Assertions
  • Preferences API
  • Chained Exception
  • IPv6 Support
  • Regular Expressions
  • Image I/O API

J2SE Version 1.3


Code named Kestrel and released on May 8, 2000.


New features in J2SE 1.3

  • Java Sound
  • Jar Indexing
  • A huge list of enhancements in almost all the java area.

Code named Playground and released on December 8, 1998.

New features in J2SE 1.2

  • Collections framework.
  • Java String memory map for constants.
  • Just In Time (JIT) compiler.
  • Jar Signer for signing Java ARchive (JAR) files.
  • Policy Tool for granting access to system resources.
  • Java Foundation Classes (JFC) which consists of Swing 1.0, Drag and Drop, and Java 2D class libraries.
  • Java Plug-in
  • Scrollable result sets, BLOB, CLOB, batch update, user-defined types in JDBC.
  • Audio support in Applets.

JDK Version 1.1 (Released on February 19, 1997)

New features in JDK 1.1

  • JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)
  • Inner Classes
  • Java Beans
  • RMI (Remote Method Invocation)
  • Reflection (introspection only)

JDK Version 1.0


Codenamed Oak and released on January 23, 1996.

Post a Comment

 
Top