I’ve just attended a talk about Java 8 by Chuk Lee at NUS Hackers meetup, and here’s the summary. If you’re impatient and want to try the code, go directly to java-8-at-a-glance repository. 🙂
Chuk started the presentation with short history of JDK, some points to note:
- Oracle acquired Sun on 2010, while JDK 7 was still under development
- At that time JDK 7 was very ambitious project, trying to make JDK more modular (i.e. we can choose which component of JDK to run our app), add lambda expressions and many more.
- Oracle asked Java community to vote, whether to release JDK 7 ASAP with incomplete intended features, or wait longer but with more complete features.
- The Java community chose the first option, and JDK 7 was released on 2011 (5 years after JDK 6 released) with decent features[1] such as NIO2, type inference in generics, and fork/join framework.
- However the promised modularity and lambda expression are not available in JDK 7.
- And here they are.. Java 8!
So, what are the highlights in Java 8?
- On language point of view: lambda expression, interface evolution
- On libraries point of view: stream & bulk data operations on collections
- On platform point of view: profiles option, a step towards modularity
