J2SE 5.0

[dougo]

Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 has been released. Despite the fact that it's still called "Java 2", this is a pretty substantial revision of the language (which I guess is why they jumped from 1.4.x to 5.0). There are lots of goodies that I'm looking forward to trying out: generics (at long last), metadata annotations, varargs, auto-boxing, enhanced for loop, enumerated types, and the list goes on.

Comments

[mattsnaps.livejournal.com]

I used an auto-boxing runtime once, but I just got a black eye.

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

Well, at least Java got lambda before C# did. (Anonymous innerclasses, that is.) I too look forward to the new Java (and the new Eclipse, which will feature refactoring tools to turn your ugly, typecasted container-using code automatically into generics-based container-using code). Just using ArrayList was more of a pain that it should have been. The new "for" makes that easier, too.

I just hope the metadata doesn't head in the wrong direction. Seems half-hearted.