JDK 8 Striking Features - Part 1

Finally, i got some good free time and thought to utilize it looking into the progress Java achieved. So, when looking into tutorial pages i saw a good thing to have in JDK 8.0 which will be launched soon and that is Aggregate Operations on Collections.

Here are the details:--

In JDK 8 a new and preferred method of iterating over a collection will be introduced and that is to obtain a stream and perform aggregate operations on it. Aggregate operations are often used in conjunction with lambda expressions to make programming more expressive, using less lines of code. The following code sequentially iterates through a collection of shapes and prints out the red objects:

myShapesCollection.stream()
.filter(e -> e.getColor() == Color.RED)
.forEach(e -> System.out.println(e.getName()));

Likewise, you could easily request a parallel stream, which might make sense if the collection is large enough and your computer has enough cores:

myShapesCollection.parallelStream()
.filter(e -> e.getColor() == Color.RED)
.forEach(e -> System.out.println(e.getName()));

There are many different ways to collect data with this API. For example, you might want to convert the elements of a Collection to String objects, then join them, separated by commas:

    String joined = elements.stream()
    .map(Object::toString)
    .collect(Collectors.joining(", "));

Or perhaps sum the salaries of all employees:

int total = employees.stream()
.collect(Collectors.summingInt(Employee::getSalary)));

These are but a few examples of what you can do with streams and aggregate operations. For more information and examples, you can go to Java Site

The Collections framework has always provided a number of so-called "bulk operations" as part of its API. These include methods that operate on entire collections, such as containsAll, addAll, removeAll, etc. Do not confuse those methods with the aggregate operations that were introduced in JDK 8. The key difference between the new aggregate operations and the existing bulk operations (containsAll, addAll, etc.) is that the old versions are all mutative, meaning that they all modify the underlying collection. In contrast, the new aggregate operations do not modify the underlying collection. When using the new aggregate operations and lambda expressions, you must take care to avoid mutation so as not to introduce problems in the future, should your code be run later from a parallel stream.

In my next post i will introduce Lambda Expressions in Java which is again a super striking feature to be introduced in JDK 8.