Pavel PolívkaAs always there is a lot of talks online about Java being a dead language. In my opinion, Java is picking up steam and lately, there is so much existing stuff happening that I am first time in a long time excited about Java.
Java 16 + 17
Java 16 was released in March. Java 16 is not an LTS (long-term support) version so many people will skip on it as they are upgrading only to LTS versions (no shame in doing that).
But there are only a few JEPs targeted to Java 17 (which will be the LTS version, released in September). The biggest one being JEP 356: Enhanced Pseudo-Random Number Generators. So 16 is pretty much a very good preview of what we all be using for the next few years.
Best of 16
There is a lot of changes in Java 16. You can find the final list here.
The main two ones being JEP 395: Records and JEP 394: Pattern Matching for instanceof. There have been long writeups about both of these features.
Records
Java lesson thread:
What are record classes?
Records are immutable data classes that require only type and name of fields.
🧵👇11:18 AM - 15 Mar 2021
Pattern Matching
Java lesson thread:
Pattern matching for instance aims to reduce unnecessary assignments to new variables or type changes in java.
🧵👇09:11 AM - 19 Mar 2021
Project Loom
The most existing feature for Java on the horizon is something called Project Loom. It's an attempt to introduce lightweight concurrency to Java. Loom will introduce a new class named Fiber. This class will behave very similar to the Thread class. But the lifecycle of fibers would be managed by Java runtime, not by the kernel. In a world where applications allow million of transactions, sessions, etc... thread for every user is not feasible. Fibers would be.
There is no release date for Project Loom, but there are a few prototypes builds you can play with.
Project Loom page.
Spring Native Beta
Spring native is finally out of the alpha stage in the beta stage. What this allows you to do is using GraalVM to compile your Spring applications into a native image. Making your runtimes smaller, much more faster (almost instant startup).
These can be deployed as standalone executables (no JVM needed) or as container images, containing minimal OS layer. You can run these on serverless with Spring Cloud Function, Kubernetes, etc...
You can find more on Spring Native GitHub pages.
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