Exciting Ideas in Java 8: Streams

Brian Goetz’s recent post on the State of the Lambda reveils exciting new ideas that are prone to be included in Java 8. One of them is the concept of “Streams” as opposed to “Collections”. Using the new Java 8 extension methods, the Iterable interface can be extended compatibly with a lot of “lazy” and “eager” methods for streaming behaviour:

public interface Iterable<T> {
    // Abstract methods
    Iterator<T> iterator();

    // Lazy operations
    Iterable<T> filter(Predicate<? super T> predicate) default ...
    <U> Iterable<U> map(Mapper<? super T, ? extends U> mapper) default ...
    <U> Iterable<U> flatMap(
        Mapper<? super T, ? extends Iterable<U>> mapper) default ...
    Iterable<T> cumulate(BinaryOperator<T> op) default ...

    Iterable<T> sorted(
        Comparator<? super T> comparator) default ...
    <U extends Comparable<? super U>> Iterable<T> sortedBy(
        Mapper<? super T, U> extractor) default ...
    Iterable<T> uniqueElements() default ...

    <U> Iterable<U> pipeline(
        Mapper<Iterable<T>, ? extends Iterable<U>> mapper) default ...
    <U> BiStream<T, U> mapped(
        Mapper<? super T, ? extends U> mapper) default ...
    <U> BiStream<U, Iterable<T>> groupBy(
        Mapper<? super T, ? extends U> mapper) default ...
    <U> BiStream<U, Iterable<T>> groupByMulti(
        Mapper<? super T, ? extends Iterable<U>> mapper) default ...

    // Eager operations
    boolean isEmpty() default ...;
    long count() default ...
    T getFirst() default ...
    T getOnly() default ...
    T getAny() default ...

    void forEach(Block<? super T> block) default ...
    T reduce(T base, BinaryOperator<T> reducer) default ...
    <A extends Fillable<? super T>> A into(A target) default ...

    boolean anyMatch(Predicate<? super T> filter) default ...
    boolean noneMatch(Predicate<? super T> filter) default ...
    boolean allMatch(Predicate<? super T> filter) default ...

    <U extends Comparable<? super U>> T maxBy(
        Mapper<? super T, U> extractor) default ...
    <U extends Comparable<? super U>> T minBy(
        Mapper<? super T, U> extractor) default ...
}

The above are rough and incomplete API ideas, or as Brian Goetz puts it: A “strawman writeup of the key concepts”.

The goal of this early publication is for the community to “TRY OUT THE CODE. *The single most valuable thing that the community can do to help move this effort forward, and improve the quality of the result, is to try out the code early and often.*”

Read the full article here:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/lambda/collections-overview.html