Interesting Links – 24 Oct 2016

  • The Way of the Lambda – Elegant and Efficient discusses using Java 8’s removeIf to remove elements from collections, as opposed to removing them via an iterator, and shows graphs to show the improvement. One claim (via Reddit) was that it was O(1) but here the claim is a little more reasonable. Another thing from the post was that the author says that he’s “recently … spent a few years away from Java development,” something that a lot of people seem to be saying now. Not sure what’s making that happen – maybe Java 8 made Java cool again.
  • Speedment is another persistence engine for Java, focusing on streams.
  • Java Method Reference Evaluation discusses Java’s evaluation of method references, as done by the :: operator. From the author: “The immediate target evaluation of method references is likely undesirable in most cases where the target can be expected to change between invocations. Consider using method references only for static methods and constructors (X::new), or with instance references that are known to remain unchanged for all invocations. If there is any chance that the target reference might need dynamic re-evaluation you will have to use a lambda expression.”
  • Meet Franz is a centralized chat application. I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it (yet) but given that I have four chat applications open at minimum at all times… it might be something I have to try soon.
  • From /r/java: apparently GWT 2.8.0 has been released. The website looks really nice; I liked GWT in the day; who knew development was ongoing? (No release notes were apparent on the website, unfortunately, so I don’t know offhand what changed; I could dig it up, but maintaining interest is difficult.)