New Features in Java 8
Lambda Expressions enable you to encapsulate a single unit of behavior and pass it to other code. You can use a lambda expressions if you want a certain action performed on each element of a collection, when a process is completed, or when a process encounters an error.
Parallel operations
With the addition of Lambda expressions to arrays operations, Java introduced a key concept into the language of internal iteration. Essentially as developers we’re used to use loop operations as one of the most basic programming idioms, right up there with if and else.
The introduction of Lambda expressions turned that paradigm around with the actual iteration over a collection over which a Lambda function is invoked is carried out by the core library.
You can think of this as an extension of iterators where the actual operation of extracting the next item from a collection on which to operate is carried out by an iterator. An exciting possibility opened by this design pattern is to enable operations carried out on long arrays such as sorting, filtering and mapping to be carried out in parallel by the framework. When dealing with server code that’s processing lengthy collections on a continuous basis, this can lead to major throughput improvements with relative work from your end.
New date / time APIs
The complexity of the current native Java library API has been a cause of pain for Java developers for many years. Joda time has been filling this vacuum for years now, and with Java 8. An immediate question that arose early on was why didn’t Java 8 adopt Joda as its native time framework. Due to what was perceived as a design flaw in Joda, Java 8 implemented its own new date / time API from scratch. The good news is that unlike Calendar.getInstance(), the new APIs were designed with simplicity in mind, and clear operations to operate on manipulated values in both human readable and machine time formats.
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