The API can read a wider array of file attributes and can offer more information when errors occur, said Staffan Friberg, a principal product manager in the Oracle Java Platform group, in a later session. It can detect when the contents of a file have been changed. It also can work with symbolic links, for those operating systems that use symbolic links.

The API also speeds file system operations, thanks to the fact that the new API makes fewer calls to the operating system, Friberg said.

"Finally we get a comprehensive file system interface," Friberg said.

Another area of improvement is the way Java can be used by multicore processors, thanks to the inclusion of the Fork/Join framework, . "Fork/Join is one of many ways to deal with expressing parallel computations that will scale well to arbitrary numbers of processor cores," Rheinhold said.

Java 7 also formally introduces support for dynamic languages. Over the past five years, more than 200 non-Java languages such as Scala, JRuby, Jython and Groovy have been developed to run on the (JVM) Java Virtual Machine, noted Oracle engineer John Rose.