Java 8 Features

Java 8 has introduced many important features. Below is the list of them.

• Default and static methods in interfaces
• Functional Interfaces
• Lambda Expressions
• Method References
• Stream API
• Base 64 Encode, Decode
• Optional class
• Collectors class
• forEach Method
• Parallal array sorting
• Nashorn Javascript engine
• IO enhancements
• Type annotations and Repeating annotations
• Concurrency enhancements
• JDBC enhancements

What is Functional Programming in Java

With introduction of Java 8, functional programming has been introduced to Java. Now, it is obvious to ask what is functional programming. Let’s try to understand the same using below points

1. Functional Programming is a paradigm that helps in using expressions and functions to be passed as method arguments
2. Functional programming also allows functions to be used as statements
3. Functional programming can also be understood as a style of programming that considers computations as evaluating functions.

We will understand all these new features in next chapters