App Engine prepares for Java 7 takeoff

Google has delivered an update to its platform-as-a-service App Engine that prepares it for a full rollout of Java 7 support, planned for a future release. With the 1.7.3 release, Java 7 is supported locally, on developers' systems in the App Engine SDK, to help them prepare for the rollout on Google's cloud platform.

The Java 7 compatible SDK will allow developers to start porting their applications to the new version and to test them locally before the Java 7 support rolls out on the cloud service. Google notes several useful features of Java 7 that will become available, such as the introduction of single catch blocks that can handle multiple exceptions, auto-closing of resources with the try-with-resources statement, improved type inference and a simplified varargs method invocation. An early preview of the functionality beyond the SDK-only support is available through a trusted tester program.

With App Engine 1.7.3, the developers have added support for Django 1.4 on Python 2.7, which was introduced to the platform in February. The update also includes the ability to grant a classloading priority to specific JAR files and a number of fixes and smaller improvements. A complete list of all new features and fixes is available in the release notes.

See also:

• Google App Engine coming to Europe and gets custom domain SSL, a report from The H.

(fab)