Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Wednesday November 18, 2009

Project Coin: Milestone 5 Language Features in NetBeans

To go along with the language changes available in JDK 7 milestone 5, the NetBeans team has created a developer build of NetBeans supporting the same set of language changes, including improved integer literals, the diamond operator, and strings in switch.

In addition to just accepting the new syntax, the NetBeans build has some deeper support too. For example, when auto-completing on a constructor with type arguments, the diamond operator is offered as a completion. To see what bounds were computed for a diamond instance, you can just hit Ctrl and click on the constructor; the bounds will appear in a pop-up. To encourage use of strings in switch, NetBeans will recognized the pattern of "if(s.equals("foo") {...} else if (s.equals("bar)..." and offer to transform that into strings in switch, just click on the "Convert to switch" lightbulb on the left hand side.

This NetBeans build with Coin support is based on NetBeans 6.8, but when 6.8 ships later this year it will not include support for Project Coin features. Project Coin support will be included in subsequent NetBeans releases.