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What's new and interesting in Java?

Ben Halpern on June 20, 2019

If I haven't been paying very close attention to the Java landscape, what am I missing? What advancements/releases are afoot?

Eduardo Gonzalez • Jun 20 '19

I would say Graal with its support for many languages and compiling bytecode to a native executable is the most exciting thing to happen to the Java world in a while.
The new ZGC and ShenandoahGC are allowing us to have large heaps while keeping GC latency consistent.
With Docker being used more and Java 10 adding support for Docker, it's pretty easy to use the latest versions of Java without having to wait years for the official every-5-year Java upgrade.
The latest versions of Java incorporate many language features from Kotlin and Scala (both awesome) which is making it a nicer looking language than it was before.
Java EE (JakartaEE) and JavaFX being spun out into independent open source projects is looking like a very positive step, as they are both getting love from the community and are better than ever.
Quarkus is a new framework that is trying to bring in all this new cool stuff together in a single place and its performance numbers are looking awesome already.
DL4J 1.0 is coming soon and brining a new auto-differentiation library that is as powerful as all the python libraries out there.
Spring Boot/Spring Cloud DataFlow is making it easier than ever to create really powerful enterprise systems.
jOOQ is and awesome embedded Java-DSL that gives you the almost the full power of SQL without relying on concatenating strings together to make a query.

Tons of cool stuff going on.

HS • Jun 22 '19

I get the cool part of the Quarkus but I'm also a fan of Micronaut. It's like Spring but less proxying (if any at all) and cool new features. Now it has some difference in syntax but I'm fine with that.

Nikola Stojaković • Jun 20 '19

I'm currently learning Java EE (I find name JakartaEE horrible) because I'm planning to move on Java web development position; I already knew about GraalVM but I had no idea about other new stuff, I'm even more motivated now!

Darren Burns • Jun 21 '19

jOOQ made working with databases in Java fun again for me!

Andrew (he/him) • Jun 20 '19

Java SE 12 has been out since March.

JDK 13 is on its way. New features to be included in 13:

"""
easy
multiline
comments
like
in
Python
"""

Improved switch statements as a precursor to pattern matching.

Improved APIs for sockets and improved garbage collection and memory management.

JDK 12 had more exciting new features like:

tee-ing streams:

double average = Stream.of(1, 4, 2, 7, 4, 6, 5)
    .collect(teeing(
        summingDouble(i -> i), 
        counting(),
        (sum, n) -> sum / n));

Java Microbenchmark Harness (JMH) is now a part of JDK. Great for benchmarking code.

...essentially, two or three new syntax features, a few API updates, and some JVM updates each release.

Ken Bellows • Jun 20 '19

Those switch expressions are super cool, and if pattern matching is coming too, that will be awesome.

Fun fact, there's a proposal for pattern matching for JavaScript/ECMAScript as well: github.com/tc39/proposal-pattern-m...

Varun Barad • Jun 20 '19

I'd say Kotlin is the biggest thing that happened to Java in the last few years.

Jonathan Kuhl • Jun 21 '19

My favorite "new" thing in Java is something as simple as var.

I hate duck typing. I hate HTTPConnectionManager httpConnectionManager = new HTTPConnectionManager().

var trims some of that away.

var httpConnectionManager = new HTTPConnectionManager() is still redundant but less so.

Ross • Jun 21 '19 • Edited

The problem arrises when devs use it too much and end up with nonsense like

var n = getValue();  //Integer, Map, int?

whereas old Java it would be clearer what was happening

Integer n = getValue();
//or
Map<Integer> n = getValue();

Conciseness will always be abused to create unreadable code.

Jonathan Kuhl • Jun 21 '19

Yeah, it's my philosophy to not use var if it's not already obvious to the reader what the type is, even if it is obvious to the compiler.

For example I'd never do:

var thing = Otherthing.build(somethingElse);

Because it's not clear to the reader what the other side is returning

But I would do

var thing = new Thing();

because the type information just gets obnoxiously redundant and it's obvious to the reader.

I know people will abuse it, but I'd prefer to not waste time typing the obvious out

Ross • Jun 21 '19

I'd love to use these features but I prefer they weren't there because most programmers will overuse them and lead to a headache for me.

I find the choice in production code tends to be dealing with forced verbosity or dealing with the absolute crazy stuff people will do when allowed to be more concise. I know which one wastes more time. It's sad but it's true

Raunak Ramakrishnan • Jun 20 '19 • Edited

Great thread. A few more interesting things which are in the pipeline:

Project Loom brings light-weight threads (fibres) to give the JVM the ability to spawn millions of threads like BEAM (Erlang VM) and Go. More info
Project Valhalla aim to bring value types in Java. This will potentially reduce the memory consumption of programs.
Project Amber brings syntax improvements like pattern matching and data classes which will make Java more expressive and less boilerplate-y!

Petros Stergioulas • Jun 20 '19

Surprisingly no one mentioned Project reactor.
Also, keep an eye on Spring Webflux and R2DBC.

Well, it's all about reactive. 😏

Meghan (she/her) • Jun 20 '19

Google's Java

Casey Brooks • Jun 20 '19

Kotlin is made by JetBrains, the brilliant folks behind Android Studio and IntelliJ, not Google. Google just encourages using Kotlin for Android development, but they do not develop it.

But yes, Kotlin is like a better syntax for Java, and fully interoperable with it. In my (very strong) opinion, new projects targeting the JVM should be written in Kotlin, not Java.

Gerard Klijs • Jun 20 '19

If it's a new project I would still much rather use Clojure instead. Part because it's more functional and has easier syntax, but mostly since it's more stable than Kotlin. I also don't like how tightly coupled Kotlin is to IntelliJ.
Also using Spring and Lombok Java is not that bad/verbose.

Casey Brooks • Jun 20 '19 • Edited

I have my strong opinion because Kotlin feels very comfortable to a traditional Java dev. It's syntax, while different, has a lot of similarities and doesn't feel like an entirely new thing. Lombok is great, but you can't deny how hacky it is; Kotlin feels more like a non-hacky version of Lombok, and ultimately has a lot of similar goals: work well with normal Java code and normal Java devs, but reduce a lot of boilerplate.

I've never used Clojure, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it is more of a departure from traditional Java development, and requires a new way of thinking about code. Kotlin just encourages that new way of functional thinking, but you're more than welcome to keep doing things "the Java way".

Valentin Baca • Jun 21 '19

I've used all three, and your assessment is spot-on.

Gerard Klijs • Jun 21 '19

I think you're pretty correct about closure, it demands another way of thinking about code in a way. I just think it's a better way, but it certainly takes more effort then using Kotlin.

rhymes • Jun 20 '19

According to JetBrains's The State of Developer Ecosystem 2019 Java is the most popular primary language

Anthony Bouvier • Jun 20 '19

Tiobe says the same:

tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

rhymes • Jun 20 '19

So weird that VB.NET is so high in the chart :D

Vince Ramces Oliveros • Jun 21 '19

Legacy code still haunts them. Oh! and technical debt too!

Dan Newton • Jun 21 '19

Nice to see a Java/JVM related post. Hopefully, more people will start writing about Java/Kotlin/JVM languages here. Most posts I see are for JS, which is fine, just means me and my JVM folks are left on the side 😩. Get writing if you got something cool to show!

Casey Brooks • Jun 20 '19

Java is finally coming to terms with the fact that every project is going to need modern Javascript, and they're working to make it less painful to work with the two ecosystems in the same project.

GraalJS is the replacement of their poorly-supported Nashorn engine (which itself was a replacement of the poorly-supported Rhino engine), supporting the full ES2019 specification and all NodeJS APIs, which runs directly inside the JVM. This makes it easier to use Javascript code from a JVM application.

In addition, Kotlin has been working to give Java developers a nicer way to write Javascript code with Kotlin/JS. The latest version of Kotlin, 1.3.40, even included Webpack bundling and NPM dependency management directly in Gradle. So now, Kotlin/JS developers can just work with their normal Gradle build tooling and get a browser app bundled or NodeJS app fully working without needing to actually learn and set up the Javascript tooling. This makes it easier for a Java developer to develop apps for the browser or Node.

Pan Chasinga • Oct 3 '19

I'd say it's probably Kotlin. I learned a lot about Java writing in it. However, I had this epiphany/deja vu with CoffeeScript and JavaScript. Yes, anyone remembers CoffeeScript, the super hip language that people were hoping to replace JS? Ended up ES6 has beaten it out of existence because it's just very cool to write but impossible to read.

Saurabh Sharma • Jun 21 '19 • Edited

The most important things for me are:

JavaFX: javafx is a cross platform GUI toolkit that was shipped with jdk before java 11 but now it is extracted in to a seprate library. Which means it's development will be independent of jdk release cycles.

NO JRE: Which means you will only be bundling necessary modules instead of whole JRE while making native build of your GUI Apps which means smaller builds.

rhymes • Jun 20 '19

woah!

Duke • Jun 21 '19

for the really, really, REALLY new, Java 12 tested a more compact way of writing case methods:

openjdk.java.net/jeps/325

it's small, simple and kinda dumb for experienced developers, but for the new kid on the block, looks very cool

Fulton Browne • Jun 20 '19

one thing i tell my friends about is the intellij ide. you can find it here

Thomas Werner • Jun 21 '19

IntelliJ IDEA and all spin-off IDEs from Jetbrains are definitely a game changer for me. Incredible productivity booster. Code analysis, automatic code suggestions and refactoring are top notch. I learned a lot about Java just by using IntelliJ.