Java is already a fully-grown adult in its own right more than two decades since its first release. With a stunning community of developers and wide adoption in a number of industries, the platform continues to evolve and keep up with the rest of the world in terms of performance, security, and scalability. We will begin our journey by exploring the most significant features introduced in Java 9, what are the biggest drivers behind them, and what more we can expect in subsequent developments of the platform, along with some of the things that did not make it in this release.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Java 9 at 20,000 feet
- Breaking the monolith
- Playing around with the Java Shell
- Taking control of external processes
- Boosting performance with G1
- Measuring performance with JMH
- Getting ready for HTTP 2.0
- Encompassing reactive programming
- Expanding the wish list