Being at JavaOne 2013 has inspired me to heed the call to option from the Java team at Oracle and give JDK 8 Early Adopter a spin. This article describes how to get from zero to running your first Lambda expression in a Java 8 program in about 10 minutes. It is definitely not a hard task. After going through these steps, you are ready to really start trying out Java SE 8 (including that long awaited new Data API).
The steps are simply:
- Download JDK 8 EA
- Download NetBeans 7.4RC1
- Install JDK 8 EA
- Install NetBeans 7.4RC1
- Run NetBeans and create a new Java project
The steps in detail:
1. Download JDK 8 EA
Go to : https://jdk8.java.net/download.html en download JDK 8 Early Adopter
2. Download NetBeans 7.4RC1
Now you are ready to start installing. I happened to use Windows7 as my operating system but the steps on Linux are very similar:
3. Install JDK 8 EA
Run the JDK 8 installer and click through the installation steps
And you are done.
4. Install NetBeans 7.4RC1
Run the NetBeans installer.
This is an important step: this is where you select the JDK to use with NetBeans; in this case this would have to be the JDK 8 that we have just been installing. Note: you can also configure the JDK of choice later on in the netbeans.conf file.
Complete the installer wizard to make the installation start.
The netbeans.conf file contains the JDK reference:
5. Run NetBeans and create a new Java project
Create a new project of type Java Application.
Provide a name and the target directory for the application
Press Finish.
Then edit the class LambdaTrial, for example with the following code that makes use of a Lambda expression (that is passed to the sort method call on Arrays):
Now run the application, and see the effect of the Lambda expression:
package lambdatrial;
import java.util.Arrays;
public class LambdaTrial {
public static int myCompare(String in, String out){
System.out.println("Compare "+in+" and "+out);
return in.length() - out.length();
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
String[] strings = new String[] {"Pear","Pineapple","Apple","Lemon"};
Arrays.sort(strings, LambdaTrial::myCompare);
for(String fruit: strings) {
System.out.println(fruit);
}
}
}
This demonstrates that with very little effort, we can create Java SE 8 code and run it. I can only suggest you try it out for yourselves.
Resources
NetBeans 7.4RC1 Information, Download Link & release notes: https://netbeans.org/community/releases/74/
NetBeans installation instructions: https://netbeans.org/community/releases/74/install.html
NetBeans configuration of JDK: http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqJdkHome
Download JDK 8 Early Adopter: https://jdk8.java.net/download.html
