The session was split up into different parts:
- "The Pragmatic Developer’s Guide to Java 9” by Simon Maple (vJUG)
- "Java 9 and the impact on Maven projects” by Robert Scholte (Apache Maven)
- "Java 9 and Performance increases" by Jonathan Ross (CJUG)
- "Java EE 8 update" by Josh Juneau (CJUG)
It was quite convenient that Jonathan Ross happened to be in the neighbourhood, as he's usually found in the neighbourhood of Chicago. Apparently he is also fluent in Dutch. The coincidences were staggering.
I shall recap in short order all the subjects that passed the agenda.
- Jigsaw
- What the module system in Java brings to the table is the enforcement of boundaries between code. To my mind this is what is necessary to keep us programmers from unheedinly increasing the entropy in the system beyond manageable limits. Classpath will be replaced with Modulepath. We will have to see how that will work out. There is a new module-info.java file for expressing the different modules and the current module uses them.
- JShell
- The REPL for Java.
- ProcessHandler
- The "top" or "ps" command for Java.
- Optional
- It was already introduced in Java 8, but now it has a new stream() function, which isn't eager like map but lazy like streams are supposed to be.
- Ahead-Of-Time compilation (AOT)
- Causing faster startup times of your java programs, instead of Just-In-Time compilation (JIT). A big requirement for Internet Of Things stuff. (You cannot wait 10 seconds for your doorbell to start up)
- CompileControl
- Programmer written hints for the compiler
- Compact strings
- All string objects use UTF-16, which basically fits into two bytes. The vast majority of the strings in applications can be expressed by just one byte using ISO-8859-1/Latin-1. So for most strings, a byte-array makes more sense than a char-array. A special indicator if a string is UTF-8, will be used to decide upon a byte-array or a char-array for storage. The indicator does not increase memory size due to memory alignment.
- Indified strings
- Concatenating strings using invokeDynamic instead of StringBuilder. This is a major performance boost.
- VarHandlers
- A way of using primitives without having to wrap them in Objects (for example AtomicInteger). It looks a bit ugly, but it's better than using com.sun.Unsafe.
- _ as keyword
- Probably a first step for JDK 10 and unused parameters in Lambdas
- Private methods in interfaces
- Nice.
- Try-with-resources small change
- You can now use effectively final variables from outside the try block in the try-with-resources statement
- Java 5 will no longer be supported by Java 9 compiler
- Time to upgrade your ancient programs!
Robert Scholte talked about Maven being ready for Java 9, even though our applications might not be ready. Java 9 brings some different requirements to the table, because of modules.
One of the big issues that might arise is that those different requirements might make the uptake of Java 9 a great deal slower than was the case for Java 8. Especially if you do not need modules right now.
Josh Juneau talked about JEE 8, the integration Java 8, and the new and upcoming release of the reference implementation Glassfish (with Payara being very close behind).
Other events scheduled.
- August 19th, 2017
- Virtual Hackday on Java 9 - https://www.meetup.com/virtualJUG/events/240545774/
- Monday, October 23, 2017
- Brian Goetz at the CJUG - https://www.meetup.com/ChicagoJUG/events/242432217/
References
- [1] NLJUG JCP Event together with CJUG and VirtualJUG
- https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-nljug-jcp-event-ism-cjug-en-virtualjug-36387496983
- [2] NLJUG
- http://www.nljug.org/
- [3] CJUG
- https://www.meetup.com/ChicagoJUG/
- [4] VJUG
- https://virtualjug.com/
- [5] JPoint
- https://www.jpoint.nl/
- Java EE Guardians
- https://javaee-guardians.io/
- Java Public House (Podcasts)
- http://www.javapubhouse.com/
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