Chapter 1. Java 8, 9, 10, and 11: what’s happening?
This chapter covers
- Why Java keeps changing
- Changing computing background
- Pressures for Java to evolve
- Introducing new core features of Java 8 and 9
Since the release of Java Development Kit (JDK 1.0) in 1996, Java has won a large following of students, project managers, and programmers who are active users. It’s an expressive language and continues to be used for projects both large and small. Its evolution (via the addition of new features) from Java 1.1 (1997) to Java 7 (2011) has been well managed. Java 8 was released in March 2014, Java 9 in September 2017, Java 10 in March 2018, and Java 11 planned for September 2018. The question is this: Why should you care about these changes?
We argue that the changes to Java 8 were in many ways more profound than any other changes to Java in its history (Java 9 adds important, but less-profound, productivity changes, as you’ll see later in this chapter, while Java 10 makes much smaller adjustments to type inference). The good news is that the changes enable you to write programs more easily. For example, instead of writing verbose code (to sort a list of apples in inventory based on their weight) like
Collections.sort(inventory, new Comparator<Apple>() {
public int compare(Apple a1, Apple a2){
return a1.getWeight().compareTo(a2.getWeight());
}
});