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Going Beyond Java 8: Local Variable Type Inference (var)

According to some surveys, such as JetBrains's great survey, Java 8 is currently the most used version of Java, despite being a 2014 release.

What you are reading is one in a series of articles titled 'Going beyond Java 8,' inspired by the contents of my book, Java for Aliens. These articles will guide you step-by-step through the most important features introduced to the language, starting from version 9. The aim is to make you aware of how important it is to move forward from Java 8, explaining the enormous advantages that the latest versions of the language offer.

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Java: Migrating From Java 8 to Java 17

This article focuses on the features to use when moving directly from Java 8 to Java 17. If your application is still running on Java 8 in production, then It’s difficult to track the features developed after version 8 onwards but there are quite a few easy to use and extremely important features available which can be learned and implemented quickly when migrating from directly Java 8 to Java 17. 

In this article I will try to highlight some of them, I will also try to highlight the versions on which the specific feature is available for us to use but not necessarily in the sequential order of release.

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Java 15: What You Should Know

Introduction

In September 2020, Oracle released a new short-term release for the Java Development Kit platform, a.k.a. Java 15. Of course, this caused quite a bit of excitement in the development world, mainly due to the many, many changes and advanced provisions it offered to developers. 

Even though it was only a short-term release Java 15 managed to pack quite a punch; from hidden classes, text blocks, to the Z Garbage Collector, a foreign memory access API, and so much more.

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Upgrading a Maven, Spring Boot, and JavaFX Application

I've been migrating all my JavaFX applications to Java 15/JavaFX 15.0.1 to see if there are any pain points or gotchas to be aware of. I particularly wanted to understand how Maven and Gradle handle JavaFX, and how to successfully build and run the applications in IntelliJ IDEA.

In this blog post, I explore the steps taken to upgrade a Spring Boot/Maven/JavaFX application.