Chapter 16. Conclusions and where next for Java

 

This chapter covers

  • New Java 8 features and their evolutionary effect on programming style
  • A few unfinished-business ideas started by Java 8
  • What Java 9 and Java 10 might bring

We covered a lot of material in this book, and we hope you now feel that you’re ready to start using the new Java 8 features in your own code, perhaps building on our examples and quizzes. In this chapter we review the journey of learning about Java 8 and the gentle push toward functional-style programming. In addition, we speculate on what future enhancements and great new features may be in Java’s pipeline beyond Java 8.

16.1. Review of Java 8 features

A good way to help you understand Java 8 as a practical, useful language is to revisit the features in turn. Instead of simply listing them, we’d like to present them as being interlinked to help you understand them not merely as a set of features but as a high-level overview of the coherent language design that is Java 8. Our other aim in this review chapter is to emphasize how most of the new features in Java 8 are facilitating functional-style programming in Java. Remember, this isn’t a capricious design choice but a conscious design strategy, centered on two trends, which we regard as climate change in the model from chapter 1:

16.2. What’s ahead for Java?

16.3. The final word