"java 8" entries
4 things to make your Java 8 code more dynamic
Anytime is a good time to refactor your code.
Java 8 has a few new features which should help you write more dynamic code. Of course one of the big features was the addition of a lambda syntax. But what about some of the other features that were added? Here are a couple of things that I tell people to do in order to make their code more dynamic and more functional.
Java 8 streams API and parallelism
Leveraging intermediate and terminal operators to process large collections.
In the last post in this series, we learned about functional interfaces and lambdas. In particular, we looked at the ITrade functional interface, and filtered a collection of trades to generate a specific value. Prior to the feature updates made available in Java 8, running bulky operations on collections at the same time was ineffective and often cumbersome. They were restricted from performing efficient parallel processing due to the inherent explicit iteration that was being used. There was no easy way of splitting a collection to apply a piece of functionality on individual elements that then ran on multi-core machine architectures — that is, until the addition of Java 8’s Streams API.
Using the command pattern with lambda expressions
Reduce boilerplate and make the intent of your code more obvious.
As Java developers we’re all familiar with the concept of Design Patterns. These are codified template solutions to problems that we may encounter when developing. We’re probably also familiar with being told by our functional programming brethren that design patterns are just “missing” language features. So the question now arises, with the introduction of lambda expressions in Java 8 and a more functional style of programming, how do design patterns change? In this article we’ll be looking at the command pattern.
A command object is an object that encapsulates all the information required to call another method later. The command pattern is a way of using this object in order to write generic code that sequences and executes methods based on runtime decisions.
There are four classes that take part in the command pattern:
- Receiver – Performs the actual work
- Command – Encapsulates all the information required to call the receiver
- Invoker – Controls the sequencing and execution of one or more commands
- Client – Creates concrete command instances
Let’s look at a concrete example of the command pattern and see how it improves with lambda expressions. Read more…
Unit Testing Java 8 Lambda Expressions and Streams
Two approaches to testing lambdafied code.
Over the past 18 months or so I’ve been talking to a lot of people about lambda expressions in Java 8. This isn’t that unusual when you’ve written a book on Java 8 and also run a training course on the topic! One of the questions I often get asked by people is how do lambda expressions alter how they test code? It’s an increasingly pertinent question in a world where more and more people have some kind of automated unit or regression test suite that runs over their project and when many people do Test Driven Development. Let’s explore some of the problems you may encounter when testing code that uses lambdas and streams and how to solve them.
Usually, when writing a unit test you call a method in your test code that gets called in your application. Given some inputs and possibly test doubles, you call these methods to test a certain behavior happening and then specify the changes you expect to result from this behavior.
Lambda expressions pose a slightly different challenge when unit testing code. Because they don’t have a name, it’s impossible to directly call them in your test code. You could choose to copy the body of the lambda expression into your test and then test that copy, but this approach has the unfortunate side effect of not actually testing the behavior of your implementation. If you change the implementation code, your test will still pass even though the implementation is performing a different task.
Java 8 functional interfaces
Getting to know various out-of-the-box functions such as Consumer, Predicate, Supplier
In the first part of this series, we learned that lambdas are a type of functional interface – an interface with a single abstract method. The Java API has many one-method interfaces such as Runnable, Callable, Comparator, ActionListener and others. They can be implemented and instantiated using anonymous class syntax. For example, take the ITrade functional interface. It has only one abstract method that takes a Trade object and returns a boolean value – perhaps checking the status of the trade or validating the order or some other condition.
@FunctionalInterface
public interface ITrade {
public boolean check(Trade t);
}In order to satisfy our requirement of checking for new trades, we could create a lambda expression, using the above functional interface, as shown here:
ITrade newTradeChecker = (Trade t) -> t.getStatus().equals("NEW");
// Or we could omit the input type setting:
ITrade newTradeChecker = (t) -> t.getStatus().equals("NEW");What’s New in Java 8: Lambdas
A hands-on introduction to Java 8's most exciting new feature
Java 8 is here, and, with it, come lambdas. Although long overdue, lambdas are a remarkable new feature that could make us rethink our programming styles and strategies. In particular, they offer exciting new possibilities for functional programming.
While lambdas are the most prominent addition to Java 8, there are many other new features, such as functional interfaces, virtual methods, class and method references, new time and date API, JavaScript support, and so on. In this post, I will focus mostly on lambdas and their associated features, as understanding this feature is a must for any Java programmer on-boarding to Java 8.
All of the code examples mentioned in this post can be found in this github repo.
What are lambdas?
Lambdas are succinctly expressed single method classes that represent behavior. They can either be assigned to a variable or passed around to other methods just like we pass data as arguments.
You’d think we’d need a new function type to represent this sort of expression. Instead, Java designers cleverly used existing interfaces with one single abstract method as the lambda’s type.
Before we go into detail, let’s look at a few examples.
Example Lambda Expressions
Here are a few examples of lambda expressions:
// Concatenating strings
(String s1, String s2) -> s1+s2;
// Squaring up two integers
(i1, i2) -> i1*i2;
// Summing up the trades quantity
(Trade t1, Trade t2) -> {
t1.setQuantity(t1.getQuantity() + t2.getQuantity());
return t1;
};
// Expecting no arguments and invoking another method
() -> doSomething();Have a look at them once again until you familiarize yourself with the syntax. It may seem a bit strange at first. We will discuss the syntax in the next section.
You might wonder what the type is for these expressions. The type of any lambda is a functional interface, which we discuss below.
Read more…
Java 8, now what?
What you'll need to know to start your Java 8 migration process today
There was recently a thread on the London Java Community mailing list about when people should think about adopting Java 8. Lambdas, an improved collections library, new date and time support, and a host of under-the-hood tweaks, add up to a lot of compelling reasons for people to upgrade. There’s still a lot of confusion over when and how to accomplish it, though, so here’s a helpful guide.
When will Java 8 be released?
The GA (General Availability) release of Oracle’s JRE and JDK, which is probably the JVM that you’re using, released March 18th. It may take other JVM vendors a while to release their implementations if you aren’t using an OpenJDK or the Oracle JDK.
So I should just upgrade on release date, right?
That would be a very brave move to make. A huge amount of resources go into testing Java 8 and ensuring that things will work out of the box on the day of release. However, the massive ecosystem of Java libraries means that not everything can be tested to destruction in time. It’s incredibly likely that there will be outstanding bugs upon release. You should expect update releases a month or two after GA, they’ll solve the major problems.
It’s also important to think about what libraries or frameworks your application depends on. If you’re just writing plain old Java then an existing codebase is likely to work fine. If, on the other hand, you depend on a library or framework that tries to do something clever then you may run into problems.