Why should you care about Java 8? It depends on who you are and what is up in your software environment where you are working. Perhaps your boss has decided to start some projects with the latest Java releases, or maybe you have heard that Java 8 is easier to exploit more of the multiple CPUs on your computers/servers. Or perhaps you believe Java 8 makes cleaner codes. However, whatever it is about, there is just one thing you should know about Java 8: Java 8 new features/changes are in many ways profound than any other changes to Java since elder Java releases. You can compare it with Java 5 releases as a contrast, where lots of new main language futures have been introduced.
- Lambda expressions (officially it’s called lambda expressions but unofficially is as closures). – Supporting lambda expressions allows to perform functional-style operations on streams of elements, such as MapReduce transformations on collections.
- Annotations on Java Types for Unsigned Integer Arithmetic
- Parallel Array Sorting
- Bulk Data Operations for Collections
- Define a standard API for Base64 encoding and decoding
- New Date & Time API
- JavaScript runtime integration which allows developers to embed JavaScript code within applications
- Supporting multicore processors
- Efficient mixing of classes and functions, how methods can be passed as functional values, and how anonymous functions (lambdas) are written
- New way to handle Streams, it generalizes many aspects of Collections but allows elements of a stream to be processed in parallel
- Introducing “default method” in an interface, it provides a method body if an implementing class chooses NOT to implement any one.
- Many interesting ideas from functional programming such as dealing with null and patternMatching and so on
Do you want to know more about the new features of Java 8? Do you want to get help understanding how to apply them in your daily programming tasks? Then you should take a look at Informators 2-day-course ”Java 8 – New Features”.