Modern Java in Action

Raoul-Gabriel Urma, Mario Fusco, Alan Mycroft

• Publisher: Manning Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781617293566
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Programación en Java

Manning's bestselling Java 8 book has been revised for Java 9 and 10! In Modern Java in Action, you'll build on your existing Java language skills with the newest features and techniques.

Part 1. Fundamentals

This first part of the book provides the fundamentals to help you get started with the new Java ideas introduced in Java 8. By the end of this first part, you’ll have a full understanding of what lambda expressions are, and you’ll be able to write code that’s both concise and flexible enough to easily adapt to changing requirements.

In chapter 1, we summarize the main changes to Java (lambda expressions, method references, streams, and default methods) and set the scene for the book.

In chapter 2, you’ll learn about behavior parameterization, a software development pattern that Java 8 relies heavily on and is the motivation for lambda expressions.

Chapter 3 gives a full explanation, with code examples and quizzes at every step, of the concepts of lambda expressions and method references.

Chapter 1. Java 8, 9, 10, and 11: what’s happening?

This chapter covers

• Why Java keeps changing
• Changing computing background
• Pressures for Java to evolve
• Introducing new core features of Java 8 and 9

Since the release of Java Development Kit (JDK 1.0) in 1996, Java has won a large following of students, project managers, and programmers who are active users. It’s an expressive language and continues to be used for projects both large and small. Its evolution (via the addition of new features) from Java 1.1 (1997) to Java 7 (2011) has been well managed. Java 8 was released in March 2014, Java 9 in September 2017, Java 10 in March 2018, and Java 11 planned for September 2018. The question is this: Why should you care about these changes?

1.1. So, what’s the big story?

We argue that the changes to Java 8 were in many ways more profound than any other changes to Java in its history (Java 9 adds important, but less-profound, productivity changes, as you’ll see later in this chapter, while Java 10 makes much smaller adjustments to type inference). The good news is that the changes enable you to write programs more easily. For example, instead of writing verbose code (to sort a list of apples in inventory based on their weight) like

Collections.sort(inventory, new Comparator<Apple>() { public int compare(Apple a1, Apple a2){ return a1.getWeight().compareTo(a2.getWeight()); } });

in Java 8 you can write more concise code that reads a lot closer to the problem statement, like the following:

inventory.sort(comparing(Apple::getWeight)); 1

• 1 The first Java 8 code of the book!

It reads “sort inventory comparing apple weight.” Don’t worry about this code for now. This book will explain what it does and how you can write similar code.

There’s also a hardware influence: commodity CPUs have become multicore—the processor in your laptop or desktop machine probably contains four or more CPU cores. But the vast majority of existing Java programs use only one of these cores and leave the other three idle (or spend a small fraction of their processing power running part of the operating system or a virus checker).

Prior to Java 8, experts might tell you that you have to use threads to use these cores. The problem is that working with threads is difficult and error-prone. Java has followed an evolutionary path of continually trying to make concurrency easier and less error-prone. Java 1.0 had threads and locks and even a memory model—the best practice at the time—but these primitives proved too difficult to use reliably in nonspecialist project teams. Java 5 added industrial-strength building blocks like thread pools and concurrent collections. Java 7 added the fork/join framework, making parallelism more practical but still difficult. Java 8 gave us a new, simpler way of thinking about parallelism. But you still have to follow some rules, which you’ll learn in this book.

As you’ll see later in this book, Java 9 adds a further structuring method for concurrency—reactive programming. Although this has more-specialist use, it standardizes a means of exploiting the RxJava and Akka reactive streams toolkits that are becoming popular for highly concurrent systems.

From the previous two desiderata (more concise code and simpler use of multicore processors) springs the whole consistent edifice captured by Java 8. We start by giving you a quick taste of these ideas (hopefully enough to intrigue you, but short enough to summarize them):

• The Streams API
• Techniques for passing code to methods
• Default methods in interfaces

Java 8 provides a new API (called Streams) that supports many parallel operations to process data and resembles the way you might think in database query languages—you express what you want in a higher-level manner, and the implementation (here the Streams library) chooses the best low-level execution mechanism. As a result, it avoids the need for you to write code that uses synchronized, which is not only highly error-prone but also more expensive than you may realize on multicore CPUs.^[1]

¹

Multicore CPUs have separate caches (fast memory) attached to each processor core. Locking requires these to be synchronized, requiring relatively slow cache-coherency-protocol inter-core communication.

From a slightly revisionist viewpoint, the addition of Streams in Java 8 can be seen as a direct cause of the two other additions to Java 8: concise techniques to pass code to methods (method references, lambdas) and default methods in interfaces.

But thinking of passing code to methods as a mere consequence of Streams downplays its range of uses within Java 8. It gives you a new concise way to express behavior parameterization. Suppose you want to write two methods that differ in only a few lines of code. You can now simply pass the code of the parts that differ as an argument (this programming technique is shorter, clearer, and less error-prone than the common tendency to use copy and paste). Experts will here note that behavior parameterization could, prior to Java 8, be encoded using anonymous classes—but we’ll let the example at the beginning of this chapter, which shows increased code conciseness with Java 8, speak for itself in terms of clarity.

The Java 8 feature of passing code to methods (and being able to return it and incorporate it into data structures) also provides access to a range of additional techniques that are commonly referred to as functional-style programming. In a nutshell, such code, called functions in the functional programming community, can be passed around and combined in a way to produce powerful programming idioms that you’ll see in Java guise throughout this book.

The meat of this chapter begins with a high-level discussion on why languages evolve, continues with sections on the core features of Java 8, and then introduces the ideas of functional-style programming that the new features simplify using and that new computer architectures favor. In essence, section 1.2 discusses the evolution process and the concepts, which Java was previously lacking, to exploit multicore parallelism in an easy way. Section 1.3 explains why passing code to methods in Java 8 is such a powerful new programming idiom, and section 1.4 does the same for Streams—the new Java 8 way of representing sequenced data and indicating whether these can be ...