Closures were not added to JDK 7, they will be added to JDK8 next year. Generics are definitely the biggest change, but not so much autoboxing (something that

Closures were not added to JDK 7, they will be added to JDK8 next year. Generics are definitely the biggest change, but not so much autoboxing (something that makes little difference to 99.9% of code). The annotations Java devs use the most are usually @Override and @Test, unless you're using bloatware like Spring/Hibernate/J(2)EE which belongs in 2004. Annotations are useful, but not really groundbreaking for most code. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_annotation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_annotation In terms of first class getter and setter, I'd say take a look at Scala (or Groovy). Lots of Java devs are looking beyond Java the language, mostly because it has been incredibly slow to evolve.