With JSR-175, Java 5 gained a metadata facility, allowing us to annotate our code with decorative syntactic metadata.

Java’s new functional abilities come with a plethora of included types. Let’s take a look into the box of provided tools.

Java has different methods of comparing objects and primitives, each with its own semantics. Using the “wrong” one can lead to unexpected results and might introduce subtle, hard-to-catch bugs.

Java is a general-purpose programming language with class-based object-orientation at its core. But, with the release of version 8, a more functional programming style became viable.

With Java 8 came one of the greatest additions to Java: the Stream API. And one of its important aspects is collecting its results.

Until Java 8, there was no better way to handle null references than checking your variables at every turn. The new class java.util.Optional<T> changed that significantly.