After four months of being back to Java for work, I would like to share my impressions about Java 8. Mind you, this is my first time with Java 8 on a project, so I do not consider myself an expert on the subject. What I can promptly say, though, is this: I have never had so much fun using Java before.

One of the reasons I have been partly away from Java since 2012 is that I have been more and more dragged towards functional programming (FP from now on). It all started with my fascination with Emacs and Emacs Lisp, then Scheme and Clojure hit my curiosity harder. Recently, Scala has been insinuating in my brain. You can already see a pattern here, can’t you? FP stole my heart.

I knew Java 8 stormed the object-oriented (OO from now on) community with plenty of FP material, but it took a new, big project and the brilliant Java 8 In Action to convince me I could go more functional than I was hoping for.

The team I work with comes from a purely OO mindset, so I was a bit reluctant to introduce FP ideas and solutions. I jumped right in the middle of the development, with a large codebase already there before the time of my arrival. The only hint of Java 8 I found was a single use of forEach with a lambda expression in it.

I then began using lambda expressions, streams and the Optional class in utility classes and enumerators I could quickly write unit tests for. The benefits were immediately evident: my code was getting clearer and concise, and programming in a declarative fashion made it easier to read and understand. My aim exactly.

To the rest of the team it all looked like syntactic sugar at first. One team member advised me to spread lambdas as little as possible. Fortunately, he soon came to appreciate my efforts and suggested not to be afraid of refactoring code smells if I felt like it.

As much as I like working with lambdas and streams, not to mention LocalDate, the Java 8 feature that really shines in our codebase is CompletableFuture.

We have a bunch of operations that need to be asynchronous. Basically, they collect data from different web services to then build a composite response for the client. The first implementation of asynchronous operations was using Future and Callable. It was working fine, but the logic behind error handling was a mess of try {…} catch {…} copied and pasted in different places. Moreover, the Callable classes were just switch statements bound to get bigger and bigger.

CompletableFuture made everything better. I wrapped each asynchronous operation in a CompletableFuture, removing the unneeded Callable. It is not hard now to comprehend the logic behind the algorithm, because it is definitely simpler than before. Error handling is just a matter of dealing with three possible exceptions.

Java 8 is neither Scala nor Clojure, but as a functional programmer wannabe it makes me appreciate Java again.