Jvmgeek

Packages in Java is a quite simple and straightforward concept of the language. It’s there from the beginning and it’s commonly used by every Java programmer. In a few words, these are the rules you have to follow to create a class inside a package (spoiler: which are not completely true, as we’ll see later): Package statement must be the first one specified in a java class file A package namespace must match the physical path of the file, i.e a class defined with a package a.b.c must be placed in a path a/b/c/ Easy right? Let’s check…

In little less than a week, a new edition of Coursera’s course, Principles of Reactive Programming from Martin Odersky, Erik Meijer and Roland Kuhn, is launching. This course is a follow-up of Principles of Functional Programming in Scala, which I took in its first edition and which I enjoyed a lot. I’ve regretted missing out first edition of this second course for a long time (more than a year, in fact), so if you want to learn about this magnificent frameworks of the Scala world, don’t miss this chance!

Purpose of this post is to provide a glimpse of the new features included in Java 8 that shift this language towards a more Functional Programming paradigm. But before, let’s define what we understand for Functional Programming (FP). Functional programming key characteristics include: Higher Order Functions Pure Functions and Immutability Tail Call Recursion Higher Order Functions for a FP language means that functions are considered first class citizens, allowing the programmer to use them as any other value the language defines, for example, a Function value:

As March 11th, Pivotal dropped its financial sponsorship for Groovy, and despite of not really endangering it, as Groovy is an already well established language with a great community backing it, it raised many concerns, as the required boost a platform like this deserves was missing until now. Furthermore, its creator and project leader until lately, Guillaume Laforge, also recently stepped back in order to focus in Restlet. Also the recent release of Java 8, with the introduction of lambdas into the Java language has increased the interest and traction of Java, making a lot of people question if there were still room for other JVM languages, even more being so closed to Java.

It’s been a little more than a year since Java 8 was released (2014/03/18) and you might think that it’s a little too late for a What’s new in post. In fact latest public update available is 8u40, so let’s review not only what was initially included in Java 8, but what else has changed during this first year, up to release 8u40. Lots of changes were included in the initial Java 8 release, being probably the most notable of them, in my opinion (feel free to disagree, looking forward to discussions):

Welcome to jvmGeek! This new blog aims to talk and discuss about the JVM ecosystem, with news and articles discussing about Java – the language -, and also about other JVM languages such as Scala, Kotlin or Clojure. But it won’t deal only about programming languages, but also about tools and libraries. You’ll find news, tutorials, code examples and more general articles, among other. From time to time I will also try to gather events and news related to one particular matter and post them as a flash post that will help you keep up to date with this effervescent platform.