How does Java fare after 6 more years of improvements? — Around 6 years ago, I wrote about using Java for shell scripts. It was a hacky and fragile way to convert some Java code into a shebang file containing the content of a Jar file. However, Java evolved quite a bit since that article, so it’s time to look at…

Taking App Localization to a New Level — Localization, or l10n, is an important step for any app to reach a broader market and be more inclusive. Up to Xcode 14, localizing your Strings always felt like a chore, as they were saved in multiple plain-text key-value .strings files that easily broke your build if there was a…

The Z Garbage Collector improves even further — Java is (in)famous for its Garbage Collection. It’s one of its main strengths, but it can also be a source of many headaches. An additional garbage collector was introduced in Java 11 (JEP 333), a low latency/high scalability GC called ZGC. …

Pattern Matching Just Got a Lot More Powerful — Pattern matching is a declarative and composable approach that creates more powerful and expressive code for data structure navigation and processing. Java 16 added pattern matching for the instanceof operator (JEP 394), and we looked at pattern matching for switch in this series before (Switch Pattern Matching. Today, it’s time…

Two features that will become deprecated and removed in a future release — Even though Java is one of the most backward-compatible languages and environments I’ve ever worked with, there’s always the possibility of feature deprecations and even removals. Java 21 will deprecate two features, so that’s what we’re looking at today. Why Deprecate Features at All? To deprecate code or a feature means that its usage is…

Improve Your Debugging with Better Breakpoints — What’s a Breakpoint Anyway? The simplest definition would say a breakpoint is a marker in your code to intentionally pause your app if the code is encountered at runtime. If you just click on the gutter to add one in Xcode, that’s true. However, breakpoints are capable of much more. Looking at breakpoints from…

Improving a classic construct even further — The switch control structure has quite an evolution lately since its inception. First, there were switch expressions (JEP 325, 354, 361). And now, we get pattern matching for switch statements and expressions! The idea of pattern matching for switch constructs is brewing since Java 17 (JEP 406) and got refined…

Storing and Sharing Data Within and Across Thread Boundaries — Today we look at Scoped Values, another interesting preview feature that’s incubating since Java 20 (JEP 429). It’s a new way to store and share immutable data with a bounded lifetime within a thread and its child threads. If you think “hey, that’s what ThreadLocal<T> is for!”, you’re thinking the…

Three new interfaces get added to the Collection Framework — Dealing with Collections is improving with Java 21, as three new interfaces get retro-fitted right into the existing type hierarchies. These Sequenced Collections give us a uniform API to access the first and last elements, and process Collections in reverse. To better understand what Sequenced Collections are, let’s take a…