To Lambda or not to Lambda?

21 April 2016

Solenix Workshop on Java 7 and Java 8 - 31 March 2016
With Java 8 being one of the largest and most significant change in its history, led by the much anticipated Lambda expressions, we at Solenix think that it is a crucial aspect of an engineer​'s life to stay up to date with the latest advancements of important technologies.

Our most recent workshop covered the new features that were introduced into the Java specification with Java SE 7 and Java SE 8. Subtitled as "How modern Java can increase productivity, performance and developer happiness" we discussed topics that were relevant to us and our projects, including, but not limited to:

  • Interacting with file-system resources through the new I/O Classes
  • New features and improvements for highly concurrent applications
  • Cleaner Exception Handling
  • Expressive manipulation of collections using the Stream API
  • Much improved Date and Time handling 
  • and, of course, Lambda Expressions

With many of our projects upgrading to recent versions of Java, we identified many use-cases that could leverage the new functionality. Until now, it was often awkward to use the words 'elegant' or 'succinct' in conjunction with Java but we agreed that many examples shown during the workshop definitely earned these descriptions. Striving towards the delivery of high quality software and services, we are convinced that, indeed, modern Java is a tool of ever increasing importance.