Simon Ritter is the Deputy CTO of Azul Systems. Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K.
Simon joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and started working with Java technology from JDK 1.0; he has spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. Having moved to Oracle as part of the Sun acquisition, he managed the Java Evangelism team for the core Java platform, Java for client applications and embedded Java. Now at Azul, he continues to help people understand Java as well as Azul’s JVM technologies and products. Simon has twice been awarded Java Rockstar status at JavaOne and is a Java Champion. He currently represents Azul on the JCP Executive Committee and on the Expert Group of JSR 379, Java SE 9.
One of the big new features in JDK 8, as we all know, was Lambda expressions. This gave us a much simpler way to represent an anonymous function without all the boilerplate code of inner classes.
The origins of Lambda expressions go back eighty years, well before Java (and even modern computing) started and is based on the work of Alonso Church, who created Lambda calculus as a mathematical model of computation.
In this session, we’ll explore how using only one new functional interface and a small library to display results in a more readable form we can solve (in theory) any problem using only Lambda expressions. This really is Java, but most of it won’t look like any code you’ve ever seen before. Be prepared for some mind-bending use of Lambda expressions!
Following on from the popular “55 New Features in Java SE 8” we bring you the eagerly-awaited sequel, “55 New Features in JDK 9”.
Obviously, the big new feature in JDK 9 is modularity and project Jigsaw, but there’s lots more to tempt developers. We’ll divide things into five categories:
- Features
- Standards
- Inside the JVM
- Specialised
- Housekeeping
Join us on a whirlwind tour of what’s in (and what’s out) in JDK 9 so you’re ready to get started with the latest version of the most popular programming platform on the planet.
