Project Coin is the new place to propose “small language changes” for Java 7. It’s being run by Joe Darcy and it’s open only for a limited time. So far, the mailing list volume has been way too high for me to keep up with. I’m still contemplating how to integrate this information into my Java 7 page.

For the moment, here is a list of all the proposals minus a couple pre-proposals and possibly missing the latest versions although I tried to catch those as they went by. So far, I think the proposals have been mostly good (although I don’t agree with all of them) and the discussion has been mostly good as well. It will be interesting to see how this set of proposals turns into actual language changes.

I wish there was something like this available for JDK changes as well. Right now API changes tend to happen in a very unorganized fashion through several vectors as far as I can tell.

• Strings in Switch – Joe Darcy
• Block Expressions for Java – Neal Gafter
• Improved Exception Handling for Java – Neal Gafter
• Automatic Resource Management – Josh Bloch
• Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation – Jeremy Manson
• Improved Wildcard Syntax for Java – Neal Gafter
• String Literals – Ruslan Shevchenko
• Use “default” keyword for default visibility – Adrian Kuhn
• Elvis and Other Null-Safe Operators – Stephen Colebourne
• Simple Resource Clean-up – Roger Hernandez
• Import Aliases for Classes and Static Methods – Phil Varner
• Lightweight Properties – David Goodenough
• ‘This’ type – Marek Kozieł
• Static Methods in Interfaces – Reinier Zwitserloot
• fold keyword – Gabriel Belingueres
• Multiple switch expressions and case ranges – Pinku Surana
• Simplified Varargs Method Invocation – Bob Lee