TOP 5 FEATURES OF JAVA 8 THAT CHANGES THE WAY YOU CODE

TOP 5 Features Of JAVA 8

Java 8 is well packed with excellent features both at the language and JVM level. If you are wondering why you need to upskill to Java 8, here are some ways in which the latest version actually changes the way you code.

Here we discuss the top 5

1.Lambda Expressions

The most important feature from Java 8 is the support for Lambda expressions.
In addition to Java brings it to the forefront of programming, along with other functional languages like Clojure and Scala.
This addition is thought to be the best addition to Java in the last 10 years.
One should become familiar with the syntax of Lambda since it relates to the collection and array operations where Lambdas are integrated into the language libraries.

2.Operations that can run parallel:

Internal iteration is possible now in Java thanks to the addition of Lambda expressions to operations in arrays.
One can loop operations as a basic programming idiom. With the introduction of Lambda expressions, carrying out actual iteration over a collection is done by the core library.
This works as an extension of iterators where the operation of being able to extract the next part from a whole collection in order to operate on is carried out by this iterator.
A good possibility opens up when the design pattern can enable operations that are carried out on long arrays like filtering, sorting, and mapping that are carried out in a parallel fashion by the framework.
When one deals with server code, the processing of lengthy collections on a regular basis can lead to a lot of throughput improvements with heavy work from the coder’s end.

3.Java + JavaScript:

A completely new script engine called the Nashorn is introduced in this new release.
This engine makes use of new features like invokeDynamic that was introduced in Java 7 that provides JVM speed to the execution of JavaScript. The next time you want to integrate JavaScript into the backend, and you can use JVM in order to execute the code instead of setting up a node.js instance.
The advantage is that one can get seamless interoperability between JavaScript code in process and Java – without needing to use RPC/IPC methods.

4.Date/Time APIs:

The complexity of the present native Java library API has proven to be troublesome for Java developers for several years. This is why Java 8 implemented its very own date/time API all the way from scratch.
This will replace the Calendar.getInstance() and proves to be more simple, with clearer operations for both human readability as well as machine time formats.

5.Concurrent Accumulators:

The most common scenarios for concurrent programming are the updation of numeric counters accessed by several threads. There have been several ways of doing this over the years, beginning right from synchronized blocks to use of AtomicInteger. Even though the later ones are more efficient, they rely directly on CAS instructions that need expertise in implementation.
This latest version tackles this problem right at the framework level when new concurrent accumulator classes allow the decreasing or increasing of the value of a counter in a thread. Using this is very simple.