The Java Language and Platform have matured a lot in the last 20 years. Born as a blue collar language, which can be understood and used by the average developer, Java stayed like that throughout all these years to become top choice for contemporary developers and projects. With every new release the language and platform engineers managed to keep the delicate balance between bringing in new features and capabilities, while maintaining the backward compatibility and the simplicity.
Looking at Java’s 20-year history, one can identify two big groups of releases. The Java architects Brian Goetz and Mark Reinhold have identified those groups as evolutionary and revolutionary. Java 5 might seem as the first revolutionary release – it brought things like generics, annotations, enums, static imports, autoboxing and unboxing of primitive types, the enhanced foreach loop and varargs. But don’t forget J2SE 1.2 before it. It introduced the Just In Time (JIT) compilation of the interpreted bytecode and the collection framework among others.
After two evolutionary versions (Java 6 and 7), Java SE 8 came out with many long anticipated changes. As Oracle already announced this April the end of public updates of Java SE 7, it is high time the Java developers become aware of what is new in version 8 and how the new features should be applied to the existing and upcoming projects.
This Hands on Lab will guide you in finding which those features are and why and how you should use them.