During the nearly twenty years of evolution of Java, a set of API design idioms and styles have emerged, based on the existing language features and APIs. Certain language features, such as generics, have had great impact: twelve years after generics, APIs that use raw types look distinctly old-fashioned. Java 8 has introduced lambdas, perhaps the most significant new language feature in Java's history. Lambdas introduce new capabilities to the API designer: the ability to parameterize by behavior, and the ability to use higher-order functions. Java 8 has also introduced default methods, which allow implementations to appear on interfaces. Along with the language changes, Java 8 has also introduced significant new core APIs, including the Streams package, the Optional class, and new default method implementations on existing interfaces. These changes raise new design issues for API designers. These new language and core API features create opportunities for designers to make their APIs more concise and more expressive. In this talk we will examine a variety of techniques and idioms enabled by these new features, and show how API design has already begun to evolve in Java 8.
Authors:
Brian Goetz
Brian Goetz has been a professional software developer for more than twenty five years. Brian is the author of the very successful 'Java Concurrency in Practice', and has written over 75 articles on Java development. He was the specification lead for JSR-335 (Lambda Expressions for the Java Language) and has served on numerous other JCP Expert Groups. Brian is the Java Language Architect at Oracle.
Stuart Marks
Stuart Marks is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Java
Platform Group at Oracle. He is currently working on
enhancing the core libraries of the JDK. He has previously worked on
JavaFX and Java ME at Sun Microsystems. He has over twenty years of
software platform product development experience in the areas of
window systems, interactive graphics, and mobile and embedded systems.
Stuart holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor's
degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
