Java Technology

Five Years Waiting for JRE 7: Is It Justified? (Part 1)

JRE 6 was released in 2006, five years after a major JRE version was released. For the past few years Java was looking stagnant, and many Java developers began to worry; this concern was amplified when Oracle purchased Sun.

We will try to discover if there's a big refactoring or maybe many features were added that can explain the time span between these two releases. In this first part we will focus on design and implementation changes, and the second part will focus on added features and breaking changes.

With JavaDepend we can compare two versions and detect any modifications concerning architecture, design or implementation. We can provide a summary of the changes using the following views.