Welcome the new Java Champion Marcus Lagergren!

Marcus Lagergren has been involved with the Java platform since the alpha versions. He worked at Appeal Virtual Machines, a performance-oriented start-up offering alternatives to byte code interpretation, slow-running thread implementations and non-native code. As one of the principal architects of the JRockit JVM, Marcus helped make sure that Java became a good alternative to writing programs in native languages. 

Marcus contributed to virtual implementations of Java on hypervisors, when virtualization was still in its infancy, and demonstrated with the JRockit VE project that virtual solutions are good alternatives to physical platforms.  

Marcus worked as a member of the Java language team implementing Java 8. He worked on improving support for dynamic languages on the JVM. Being a performance engineer at heart, Marcus demonstrated that dynamic languages, thanks to invokedynamic, achieve similar performance on the JVM compared to languages with a static type system. 

Marcus has co-authored a book on JVM internals, “Oracle JRockit - The Definitive Guide”. He is also a frequent speaker at Java conferences. Follow him @lagergren

The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Learn more about Java Champions

Suppose you want to execute some code that queries a database so the code is executed in a separate thread and then trigger the printing of the query result when it is available. Using a well-known pattern introduced in Java 5, you could wrap the task to be executed in a Callable, and submit this object to an ExecutorService. But the only way to get the result is to use a blocking method: the get() method of the Future object returned by the submission of the Callable. Paumard shows how to use CompletionStage instead, which results in no more thread blocking. 

In this article "CompletableFuture for Asynchronous Programming in Java 8", José Paumard describes several elegant patterns that enable you to chain and compose tasks in a very rich way, as well as control which thread executes each task. To see examples of how to use CompletionStage and CompletableFuture to fine-tune asynchronous data processing pipelines that suit the needs of your applications, check out the article.

Have you ever had a need for a standard gauge control? Gerrit Grunwald has, so he decided to create a library of gauges he calls Medusa. 

In his "Medusa: Gauges for JavaFX" article, he describes the standard gauge his library provides, plus he explains his FGauge control, which enables you to easily embed the Medusa standard gauge into a simple control you create that contains a frame and a background. 

The main idea of Medusa was to enable developers to use one gauge control class that contains all the properties a gauge needs. Grunwald also created several skins and a GaugeBuilder class that lets you easily set gauge parameters. To see examples and learn more, read the article.

Are you effectively using Java SE 8 streams for data processing? Introduced in Java 8, streams allow you to process data in a declarative way and leverage multi-core architectures without writing multithread code. 

Watch two JavaOne 2015 sessions about streams. Paul Sandoz presented the ‘Effective Java Stream’ session, where he discusses tips and tricks, effective parallel execution and what to expect in Java 9 and beyond. 

Brian Goetz and Stuart Marks from the Java Platform group presented the ‘API Design with Java 8 Lambdas and Streams’ session. They discussed the design of lambdas and streams, lessons learned, as well as when and why to use specific APIs. Stuart explained the design of streams, the difference between collections and streams and how to best use them.  

Watch additional JavaOne 2015 sessions

JDK 8u71 and 8u72, two new Java 8 updates are now available. Oracle strongly recommends that most Java SE users upgrade to the latest Java 8u71 CPU release, which includes important security fixes. Java SE 8u72 is a patch-set update, including all of 8u71 plus additional features. You can download the latest JDK releases from Java SE Downloads page. 

For information on new features and bug fixes included in these releases, see the following release notes: 

• JDK 8u71 Release Notes

• JDK 8u72 Release Notes

Check out Java CPU and PSU Releases Explained for more details 

Interested in learning about elegant patterns that provide new ways to handle corner cases for data processing pipelines?

In this article, José Paumard explores several patterns that use Optional, a new Java SE 8 final class with a private constructor. This class provides alternatives for writing data processing pipelines built on streams, resulting in better and more-fluent code.

Paumard describes how to build optionals, explains why we need them, and demonstrates several patterns you can use in various scenarios. The first patterns use an optional as a wrapper object, which may or not have a value. The second patterns expose methods of the optional class. 

To learn more, read the article.

Congratulations to the new Java Champion: José Paumard!

José is an assistant professor at the Institut Galilée (Université Paris 13), PhD in applied mathematics from the ENS de Cachan. He has also worked as one of the lead members of the Paris JUG for 6 years, and is a co-founder of Devoxx France.

As a member of the CDI 2.0 Expert Group, he has contributed new ways of handling events, especially in the asynchronous part of the spec. He provided new patterns that have been adopted by the EG. 

José has been working as an independent programmer for 20 years and is a well-known Java / Java EE / software craftsmanship expert and trainer. His expertise includes Tomcat, JBoss, Weblogic, Websphere, Glassfish, and the most popular Java EE parts: JPA (Hibernate & Eclipselink), EJB (including version 2), JMS, JTA, the Web tier, and more.  

José speaks at conferences, including JavaOne and Devoxx; and writes technical articles for various publications including Java Magazine and Oracle Technology Network. Passionate about education, he publishes MOOC for several companies: Oracle Virtual Technology Summit, Pluralsight, Microsoft Virtual Academy and Voxxed.

His blog: blog.paumard.org/en/ Follow him @josepaumard

Java champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technologists and community leaders who are community-nominated. Learn more about Java Champions.