JUGMK Java 7 presentation

Today I attended the JUGMK Java 7 presentation which held place in the City Fair business center. The event was well organised thanks to the Macedonia JUG and the sponsors Seavus and Netcetera.
It started with a brief presentation of the history of JUGMK given by Ice Panov. He pointed out the beginnings of the Java User Group in Macedonia which was founded as an NGO in February 2008. It was a result of the enthusiastic work of several Java developers whose effort led to a fully functional group which today organizes both informal meetings and formal technical sessions. He pointed out the JUGMK presence on the Java2Days in Sofia this year as well as the new event called Summer of Code in which newbies can get hands on experience with the Java programming language.
The second part of the presentation was held by Simon Ritter, a java evangelist who pointed out the new path that Java is taking under the guidance of Oracle. He stated that Sun and Oracle are very different companies but have one thing in common: Both companies want to see Java everywhere in the software market. In the presentation he pointed out the problems that led to the delay of Java 7 and how Oracle resolved them by excluding Apache from the Java decision making committee. The decision was tough he said but eventually it led to unlocking of the JSR committees and the release of Java 7.
In the next part of the presentation Simon pointed out the new features in Java 7 which include switch statements with strings, proper closing of streams within the try block, the Path class which complements the File class, the JLayer decorator for components and many more.
In the closing part of his speech he stated that the major changes are coming in java 8 which will include closures and modularity.
After more than two hours the presentation ended and the attendees were invited to a glass of beer which we of course never refuse. All in all this was a time well spent and I plan to attend more JUGMK events in the future.