Java 8 - A giant leap in the Java Community

The largest, open sourced, community driven platform - Java has recently released Java 8,

amongst a lot of drone and anticipation, introducing many new features. Java 8 is bundled

with some really useful and stirring features at the JVM and the language level. It comprises

of a wide upgrade to the Java programming model and a synchronized development of the

Java language, libraries and JVM.

Major Benefits of these new features are Ease of use, Higher productivity, Enhanced

performance, Higher security, Improved polyglot programming.

New Features of Java 8

Lambda Expressions

The major highlight of Java 8 is Lambda Expressions, which focuses on passing behaviour to

methods. This feature replaces Anonymous classes and allows you to write code in

functional style, which is much more user friendly and expressive. It is an amalgamation of

functional and object oriented capabilities, which assists in enhancing the integration of

third party libraries. Lambdas depict a cleaner syntax for event listeners, which means

shorter lambda expressions can be used to express any single method interface.

Method References

Along with Java 8 comes its method references which are shortcuts that you can utilize at

any place where you could used a Lambda. It has the capability to exercise a method as an

argument for a similar functional interface.

Lambda Expressions

Method References

Default Methods

New Stream API

New Date / Time API

Nashorn

Default Methods

Java 8 introduces Default Methods, a new feature which lets the developer add new

methods to the interfaces without disturbing the current implementation of these

interfaces.

New Stream API

Java 8 introduces Streams, which is a type of iterator which allows a single run over the

collection it is called upon. Streams can be used to execute functional procedures like filer

or map / reduce over collections. It can be executed sequentially or parallel as required.

New Date / Time API

Java 8 has come up with its new date / time API owing to the drawbacks earlier Java

versions faced due to the native time framework. These APIs are simplified and designed

with a clear view to operate upon values both in human readable as well as machine time

formats.

Nashorn

Looking to the increasing gap between Java and JavaScript, Java 8 has come up with

Nashorn, an engine which enables JavaScript to run on a JVM. It is compatible with Node.js

applications also letting the actual Java libraries being called by the code running on the

server.

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