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Let's revisit Java in 2019

Sumit on October 19, 2019

It's been 6 years from now since Java 8 was released and people are still not able to digest the features of it, wasn’t Java 8 a fantastic update t...

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Thorsten Hirsch • Oct 20 '19

Java is hip again, indeed. The language has received great updates as well as the JVM (and there are several to chose from). However project jigsaws can be a pain in the ass du to errors like this:

cannot access class jdk.internal.misc.Unsafe

Or this one:

...because module java.base does not export jdk.internal.misc to unnamed module.

And then you have to find out which VM args to use. Is it "–illegal-access=permit"? Or "--add-exports java.base/jdk.internal.misc=ALL-UNNAMED". Or even "--add-opens=java.base/jdk.internal.ref=ALL-UNNAMED"? That sucks.

But on the plus side there's jlink. With jlink it's possible to build Docker containers of less than 100MB that includes Alpine Linux, a stripped down JDK 11 and your app with all dependencies. That's really a big achievement and compensates for the trouble that the Java module system has caused.

Anthony Bruno • Oct 20 '19

Nice article! The increased cadence of releases has allowed a lot of cool features to be added to Java. Even the smaller additions of List.of() and Map.of() has saved me heaps of time!

The new HttpClient is also a nice replacement for UrlConnection. I wrote an article about it here.

Sumit • Oct 20 '19

These new changes and collection factory method really reduced lots of boilerplate, at least now I am feeling happy as a Java developer after so long 😉

Mustapha Belmokhtar • Oct 19 '19

thanks @sumit for the article.
In this example

Stream<String> stream = Stream.of("sam", "sumit", "jhon","nancy");
List<String> list = stream.dropWhile(name -> (name.charAt(0) == 'a'))
              .collect(Collectors.toList());

The drop-while conditon is name.charAt(0) == 's'.

Regards

Sumit • Oct 19 '19

@mustapha , thanks for your valuable time to read and pointing out the mistake, fixed it :)

Ben • Jul 25 '20

Java 11 supports cgroups out of the box (came in Java 10) which are necessary for resource limits on containers, a handy feature in Kubernetes. Just another reason to upgrade to keep up with modern tech stacks.

Geoffrey Arthaud • Oct 25 '19

Many Thanks for your article. I personnally like the strategy you suggest : you dev and push code in production with Java LTS release (Java 11 today) ; and you thoroughly test every following version (12 and 13 today) on your CI !

Fulton Browne • Oct 19 '19

Great article, I have bean a java developer for 2 years and I didn't know about the var feature, thanks for mentioning it, it should save me some time.

David Dal Busco • Oct 19 '19 • Edited

Me neither I didn't knew about var.

In Javascript nowadays using var is kind of discouraged. It's kind of funny that in Java it's the contrary.

Thorsten Hirsch • Oct 20 '19

Well, but the reason is obvious, isn't it? A "var" has completely different implications in these 2 languages.

David Dal Busco • Oct 20 '19

I did not say the opposite.

prathamesh • Oct 22 '19

Very well written.. but yeah there are some other dynamic programming languages available in market to overcome the underfloor stack. I have been using Java for long time on just putting my hands on python, I found python really easy and interesting. Yeah Java is generally faster and more efficient than Python coz it is compiled language.but python had really great libraries and most of the major libraries are available with free licences for commercial use.