Foreword

“Kirk told me I could buy beer at the petrol station,” was the first sentence I heard out of Ben Evans’ mouth. He had come to Crete for an Open Spaces Java conference. I explained that I usually bought petrol at the petrol station, but that there was a shop around the corner that sold beer. Ben looked disappointed. I had lived on this Greek island for five years and had never thought of trying to buy beer at the local BP.

I felt a bit like this while reading this book. I consider myself a Java fundi. I have spent the past 15 years programming Java, writing hundreds of articles, speaking at conferences, and teaching advanced Java courses. And yet, when I read Ben and Martijn’s book, I kept coming across ideas that I hadn’t thought of. They start by explaining the development effort of changing certain parts of the Java ecosystem. Changing the internals of a library is relatively easy, and we might see some improved performance for certain input. Arrays.sort() is now using TimSort, instead of MergeSort. If you sort a partially ordered array, you might see a slight performance improvement without changing your code. Changing the class file format or adding a new VM feature requires a major effort. Ben knows. He sits on the JCP Executive Committee. This book is also about Java 7, so you’ll learn all the new features, such as the syntactic sugar enhancements, switching on Strings, fork/join, and the Java NIO.2.