JDK1.7 Features

• JVM support for dynamic languages, following the prototyping work currently done on the Multi Language Virtual Machine
• Compressed 64-bit pointers Available in Java 6 with -XX:+UseCompressedOops
• Small language changes (grouped under a project named Coin)

• Strings in switch
• Automatic resource management in try-statement
• Improved type inference for generic instance creation
• Simplified varargs method declaration
• Binary integer literals
• Allowing underscores in numeric literals
• Catching multiple exception types and rethrowing exceptions with improved type checking

• Concurrency utilities 
• New file I/O library to enhance platform independence and add support for metadata and symbolic links. The new packages are java.nio.file and java.nio.file.attribute
• Library-level support for Elliptic curve cryptography algorithms
• An XRender pipeline for Java 2D, which improves handling of features specific to modern GPUs
• New platform APIs for the graphics features originally planned for release in Java version 6u10
• Enhanced library-level support for new network protocols, including SCTP and Sockets Direct Protocol
• Upstream updates to XML and Unicode

1. The ability to use a try-with-resources statement to automatically close resources of type Connection, ResultSet, and Statement
2. RowSet 1.1: The introduction of the RowSetFactory interface and the RowSetProvider class, which enable you to create all types of row sets supported by your JDBC driver.

 ^{Refer to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-418459.html}