Java Weekly 50: Nashorn improvements, Jigsaw, CDI 2.0 sneak peak and more...

The Java world is evolving at a rapid pace and it can be challenging to keep track of it. Fortunately lots of great resources are created every week, explaining new features or looking at existing stuff from a different angle.

I am using the Java Weekly series to collect the most interesting links I found during the last week and present them to you all in one place. I hope you find it useful and that it makes it easier for you to keep up-to-date. If you like to suggest a resource or something I can improve on, please leave me a comment.

Java

Martin Fowler explains in his article Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations why you should not throw Exceptions in most of your validation code. He also shows how to refactor your validation code to return a list with notifications for every detected error without breaking your existing applications.


Marcus Lagergren wrote an interesting article about the improvements of the Nashorn engine in the upcoming JDK 8u40 release. And if you like to learn more about the internals of the new type system, you should have a look at the linked resources at the end of his article.

Java 9

The modular run-time images of project Jigsaw are part of the new JDK 9 early-access build 41. This change will have significant impact on developers and end users as Mark Reinhold wrote in his recent blog post: Project Jigsaw: Modular run-time images

Java EE

Did you know that hibernate supports optimistic locking without a version column?
Well, it does as Vlad Mihalcea shows in his recent post: The downside of version-less optimistic locking.
This comes very handy if you need to support a legacy database schema but it also has some drawbacks.

Java EE 8

Do you like to take a sneak peak at some features currently discussed by the CDI 2.0 expert group? Than you should have a look at the Weld 3.0.0.Alpha3 release and read the accompanying post by Jozef Hartinger. He explains how to get and use the new version of Weld and how to use the newest prototype for asynchronous events in CDI 2.0.

This and that

The Java bean specification in the current version 1.01 is quite old. 17 years old to be precise. So it's obvious that it doesn't fit well into the current development. But how might a new version 2.0 look like?
Stephen Colebourne explained his ideas for a new version of the specification in his recent blog post: What might a Beans v2.0 spec contain?


Trisha Gee wrote a great post about a big problem in our industry: The way we communicate with and listen to other people. Well, from my point of view this is not only a problem of our industry, it is a more general problem. But Trisha put her focus on software development teams in her article and that's ok. She explains how important it is to listen to all developers to create the best ideas and keep everyone motivated: Developers want to be heard

Upcoming online events

Dick Wall will give a talk Scala for Java Developers at 5pm UTC on Tuesday 16th at the vJUG.

See you next week!

These were the most interesting resources I found this week. I hope you find them useful and I see you next Monday for the next issue. You can subscribe below to get an email notification for it or follow me on twitter and google+.

If you like to suggest a link for next weeks issue or something I can improve on, please write me a comment.