Java 7 aka Groovy 1.0

Just a short post this time, as i'm a bit sleepy this evening.

It seems like a lot of blogs lately have been mentioning some of the features proposed for jdk 7. Admittedly, I'm only going on blog headlines plus a small bit of reading on the blogs..so i might be making some wrong assumptions.

The 2 points i have read about the most..the property operator and null handling..both of these are already in Groovy. I know Groovy got some of these ideas from other languages, and java is trying to adopt some dynamic features to keep developers interested in java.

I'll admit i've been reading Groovy in Action (so my groovy knowledge is still theoretical), and i'm pretty excited about trying to learn Groovy well enough to begin using in my projects. I would think any java fan would find lots to like in Groovy, if they can forget about the early hype and examine groovy with an open mind.

Anyway..it seems funny that jdk is trying to adopt some ideas that are already done better in Groovy. I like that Groovy overloads the . (dot) operator for property access, instead of creating a new -> operator. I believe both can generate the accessor methods for you, if you desire.

I also like Groovy's safe null check, using the ?

In Groovy to prevent null pointers, you would so something like obj1?.obj2?.someMethod

In java 7 proposal it look like this in java:
obj1#getObj2()#getSomething()

In both cases discussed here (property access and null handling)..i like the present Groovy solution over the current java 7 proposal.

I wonder how many more future java 7 proposals will mimic Groovy functionality?