Some possible language changes being considered for Dolphin include:

• property support (for getFoo()/setFoo() pattern)
• method references (a quick way to write an event notification pattern)
• block closures (collection of statements within a statement)
• native XML support

Java 7.0 New Features

• Closures

  Closures are something like C callbacks, a pointer to a function that you can pass as a parameter. In addition to the method, some context around that method is snapshotted to go along with it in the closure.

  Another way of putting it is a closure is an anonymous function body, that can be declared and passed around as a first-class object, and which can refer to variables from its enclosing scope. The anonymous classes in JDK 1.1 provide closure-like facilities, albeit with tacky syntax. Smalltalk “blocks” are closures.

• JSR 277 Java Module System

  

• JSR 294 Improved Modularity Support

• JSR 295 Beans Binding

• JSR 303 Beans Validation

• JSR 296 Swing Application Framework

• JSR 203 NIO2JSR 220 Java Persistence APIs

• JSR 255 JMX 2.0

• JSR 262 Web Services Connector for JMX

• JSR 260 Javadoc Technology Update

• JSR 275 Units and Quantities

• JSR 310 Date and Time API

• JSR 308 Annotations on Java Types