The world has been waiting for Java 9 for a long time. More specifically, we've been waiting for the Java Platform Module System, and Java 9 is finally going to deliver it. If all goes as planned, we'll finally have true isolation, giving us, potentially, smaller JDKs and more stable applications. That's not all that Java 9 is offering of course; there is a plethora of great changes in the release, but that's certainly the most exciting. That said, this book is not a book about the module system. There are plenty of excellent resources that can give you a deep dive into the Java Platform Module System and its many implications. This book, though, is a much more practical look at Java 9. Rather than discussing the minutiae of the release, as satisfying as that can be, what we'll do over the next few hundred pages is look at different ways all of the great changes in recent JDK releases--especially Java 9--can be applied in practical ways.
When we're done, you'll have ten different projects that cover a myriad of problem areas, from which you can draw usable examples as you work to solve your own unique challenges.
Chapter 1, Introduction, gives a quick overview of the new features in Java 9, and also covers some of the major features of Java 7 and 8 as well, setting the stage for what we'll be using in later chapters.
Chapter 2, Managing Process in Java, builds a simple process management application (akin to Unix's top command), as we explore the new OS process management API changes in Java 9.
Chapter 3, Duplicate File Finder, demonstrates the use of the New File I/O APIs in an application, both command line and GUI, that will search for and identify duplicate files. Technologies such as file hashing, streams, and JavaFX are heavily used.
Chapter 4, Date Calculator, shows a library and command-line tool to perform date calculations. We will see Java 8's Date/Time API exercised heavily.
Chapter 5, Sunago - A Social Media Aggregator, shows how one can integrate with third-party systems to build an aggregator. We'll work with REST APIs, JavaFX, and pluggable application architectures.
Chapter 6, Sunago - An Android Port, sees us return to our application from Chapter 5, Sunago - A Social Media Aggregator.
Chapter 7, Email and Spam Management with MailFilter, builds a mail filtering application, explaining how the various email protocols work, then demonstrates how to interact with emails using the standard Java email API--JavaMail.
Chapter 8, Photo Management with PhotoBeans, takes us in a completely different direction when we build a photo management application using the NetBeans Rich Client Platform.
Chapter 9, Taking Notes with Monumentum, holds yet another new direction. In this chapter, we build an application--and microservice--that offers web-based note-taking similar to several popular commercial offerings.
Chapter 10, Serverless Java, moves us into the cloud as we build a Function as a Service system in Java to send email and SMS-based notifications.
Chapter 11, DeskDroid - A Desktop Client for Your Android Phone, demonstrates a simple approach for a desktop client to interact with an Android device as we build an application to view and send text messages from our desktop.
Chapter 12, What's Next?, discusses what the future might hold for Java, and also touches upon two recent challengers to Java's preeminence on the JVM--Ceylon and Kotlin.
You need the Java Development Kit (JDK) 9, NetBeans 8.2 or newer, and Maven 3.0 or newer. Some chapters will require additional software, including Scene Builder from Gluon and Android Studio.
This book is for beginner to intermediate developers who are interested in seeing new and varied APIs and programming techniques applied in practical examples. Deep understanding of Java is not required, but a basic familiarity with the language and its ecosystem, build tools, and so on is assumed.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The Java architects have introduced a new file, module-info.java, similar to the existing package-info.java file, found at the root of the module, for example at src/main/java/module-info.java."
A block of code is set as follows:
module com.steeplesoft.foo.intro {
requires com.steeplesoft.bar;
exports com.steeplesoft.foo.intro.model;
exports com.steeplesoft.foo.intro.api;
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ mvn -Puber installNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In the New Project window, we select Maven then NetBeans Application."
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