This chapter covers
- Java as a platform and a language
- The new Java release model
- Enhanced Type inference (
var)
- Incubating and Preview Features
- Changing the language
- Small language changes in Java 11
Welcome to Java in 2022. It is an exciting time. Java 17, the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release shipped - in September 2021, and the first and most adventurous teams are starting to move to it.
At the time of writing, apart from a few trailblazers, Java applications are more-or-less evenly split between running on Java 11 (released September 2018) and the much older Java 8 (2014). There is a lot to recommend Java 11, especially for teams that are deploying in the cloud, but some developers have been a little slow to adopt it.
So, in the first part of this book, we are going to spend some time introducing some new features that have arrived in Java 11 and 17. Hopefully, this discussion will help convince some teams and managers who may be reluctant to upgrade from 8 that things are better than ever in the newer versions.
Our focus for this chapter is going to be Java 11 because a) it’s the LTS version with the largest market share and b) there has not been any noticeable adoption of Java 17 yet. However, in Chapter 3 we will introduce the new features of Java 17 to bring you all the way up to date.