Java 9 is a major release, which brings highly anticipated modularization.

I’m late to Java 9 feature release party. But I’ll try to list all features that have captured my attention.

Modularization (Project Jigsaw)

Most notable feature in this release is Java module system a.k.a “Jigsaw”.

Module system should solve two problems: encapsulation and dependency declaration.

Before Java 9 all public classes loaded from external Jars were accessible in the project. Because of this reason, it is easy to accidentally expose API’s that are meant to be used privately. The new module system addresses it by defining exposed packages in module-info.java file.

New module system lets to describe dependencies in module-info.java file.

budget module-info.java:

module com.dovydasvenckus.budget {
    exports com.dovydasvenckus.budget;

    requires com.dovydasvenckus.ledger;
}

ledger module-info.java:

module com.dovydasvenckus.ledger {
    exports com.dovydasvenckus.ledger
}

In this example, we have defined budgeting module that exposes only classes from com.dovydasvenckus.budget package. Exposed package children are not exposed, for example, classes in com.dovydasvenckus.budget.helper package won’t be exposed to modules that import it.

In this example, I have also defined dependency our budget module depends on ledger module. Ledger module exposes only classes in com.dovydasvenckus.ledger package.

Also, JDK was modularized with this release, using jlink tool you can create minimal JRE, that will be deployed with your application. If your application does not require java.sql module you can make JRE that won’t include it. It makes sense to deploy lightweight JRE on embedded devices or when we are using microservices that do not require full JDK. More on it Openjdk docs.

This topic is too wide to describe in this blog post, so I highly recommend to visit official documentation OpenJDK Jigsaw quick start.

HTTP 2 client

Major browsers supported HTTP/2 for a long time, finally Java has caught up and introduced HTTP/2 client. This new client also supports WebSockets.

This module is released in incubation state. You can use incubating modules now, but they will be officially released in a future release. In JDK10 it should be moved from jdk.incubator.httpclient to java.httpclient module. Also, JDK10 might introduce breaking changes.

Java shell (Jshell)

Finally, Java has introduced REPL(Read Evaluate Print Loop) shell that allows running Java commands interactively. Sometimes it is really useful to test code snippet, for this purpose I have used GroovyConsole. But GroovyConsole is not perfect because it uses Groovy language which is a superset of Java.

jshell> String hello = "Hello World"
hello ==> "Hello World"
jshell> System.out.println(hello)
Hello World

As you can see commands does not require a semicolon to execute them. Also, shell supports Tab autocomplete, enjoy it :).

Also, I had hope that shell would allow executing commands from a Java file. But it does not support this feature. In my opinion, it would be nice to be able to write Java script files and execute them using single command. So for Java scripting, I’ll stick with Nashorn or Groovy.

This improvement is small but convenient. Now Java docs support auto completable search. Before this feature, it was painfully slow to find something in Java API documentation because you had to navigate using mouse and you had to know in which package class resides. Whenever I was searching for class I have always googled because it was a faster way to navigate to class.

Stream improvements

One of my favorite features of Java 8 was Streams. It changed the way many people write code that deals with collections. Code written with streams is compact and easily readable.

In Java 9 streams got even better. Stream has 4 new methods:

  • dropWhile discards first elements of the stream until condicion is met.
  • takeWhile process items until condition is met.
  • iterate lets write direct replacment for loops. 
    Stream.iterate(0, i -> i < 100, i -> i + 1)
.forEach(System.out::println);
  • OfNullable Lets create stream without checking if element is null. When element is non null it returns stream with single element, else it returns empty Stream.

Easier creation of immutable Collections

Java 9 introduced static methods for different collections. Now it is easier to create immutable lists, sets, maps.

List<String> fruits = List.of("Apple", "Orange", "Banana");
Map<String, Integer> stock = Map.of("Apple", 7, "Orange", 20, "Banana", 15);
Set<Integer> numbers = Set.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

Optional improvements

In Java 9 release Optional type received some love.

Three new methods were added to Optional class.

  • void stream() method transforms optional to stream
  • void ifPresentOrElse​(Consumer<? super T> action, Runnable emptyAction)`. Same as ifPresent, but includes method to execute when optional empty.
  • Optional<T> or(Supplier<? extends Optional<? extends T>> supplier). It is similar to orElseGet, but instead of returning T object it returns Optional. Because of that, you can chain multiple or() methods.
Person nameLess = new Person("45122", null, null);

Optional<String> firstName = Optional.of(nameLess)
        .map(Person::getFirstName)
        .or(() -> localNameResolver.resolveName(nameLess.getPersonalId()))
        .or(() -> externalNameResolver.resolveName(nameLess.getPersonalId()));

If person has missing name, then it will call localNameResolver.resolveName(). If this method returns empty Optional, then it will call externalNameResolver.resolveName().

Private methods in interfaces

Java 8 has introduced default method in interfaces. Java 9 added an ability to add private method to interfaces. So if two default methods use duplicated code, you can move that code to private method.

public interface HelloInterface {

    default String helloWorld() {
        return hello("World");
    }

    default String helloJohn() {
        return hello("John");
    }

    private static String hello(String name) {
        return String.format("Hello %s!", name);
    }
}

Process API improvements

Java 9 has some improvements to processes API. It has added a few method to deal with system processes.

For example, it was painful to get PID, you had to write boilerplate code that was OS dependent. Now it is easily retrievable using a single command.

ProcessHandle currentProcess = ProcessHandle.current();
System.out.println(currentProcess.getPid())

Reactive Streams API

Java 9 has introduced Flow APIs. This will allow 3rd party vendors to implement publish-subscribe frameworks. JEP 266 specification contains 4 interfaces located in java.util.concurrent.Flow class.

These interfaces include:

Minor changes that probably won’t be noticed

  • Now you can get current java version by using java –version, instead of -version. This operation will be compliant with Unix philosophy because verbal operations should have two dashes before and short hand operations should have single a dash.
  • Underscore character is reserved. You can’t create variable _ anymore. JEP 213
  • Stack walking API JEP 259
  • Applet API deprecation JEP 289
  • @Deprecated annotation has new two fields. forRemoval and since. JEP 277
  • Default garbage collector was changed to G1. JEP 248
  • Compact Strings JEP 254
  • Java Platform Logging API JEP 264
  • Try with resource improvements JEP 213. My blog post on these changes

Conclusion

I have mentioned most notable features. There are probably plenty features that I have missed. For me, Java 9 release is quite an exciting one.

Modularization is a huge feature and in my opinion, it will take quite some time to it being widely adopted.

Besides modularization Java 9 includes many small handy features. I’ll try to adopt these new features in my code.