Project Coin

The goal of Project Coin is to determine what set of small language changes should be added to JDK 7. That list is:

Strings in switch
Binary integral literals and underscores in numeric literals
Multi-catch and more precise rethrow
Improved type inference for generic instance creation (diamond)
try-with-resources statement
Simplified varargs method invocation

The previously selected features of collections support and unsigned literals have been deferred and will be reconsidered in JDK 8.
History

An open call for proposals period ran from February 27, 2009 through March 30, 2009. The nearly 70 proposal forms that were submitted received extensive discussion on the Project Coin mailing list, coin-dev.

After due consideration, five or so proposals were selected for inclusion in JDK 7; the list of selected proposals was subsequently updated. Discussion of the selected proposals continues on the coin-dev list.

This Project is sponsored by the Compiler Group.
Community

Mailing lists
    coin-dev
Bloggers
    Joe Darcy and other Sun bloggers
Wiki
    http://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Coin/Main