Effects on ecosystem

Thank you for your book! I haven't read it yet, of course, but I've read your work before, so I'm confident this one will be helpful.

How do you imagine the impact of this turn toward functional programming to impact the various pieces of the Java ecosystem to which many of us have grown accustomed? For example, where does this leave Groovy? What will be the impact on Spring users? Will we design the division of work differently between the back-end system and front-end code like javascript?

Thanks,
Rick

Hi, I don't think the new features of Java 8 will have much of an impact on Groovy or Spring.

Groovy has lambdas, of course, but you wouldn't replace Groovy with Java 8 just because Java 8 now also has closures. Groovy is a scripting language. It has metaprogramming features, similar to Ruby, so you can implement Grails and Gradle. You can't do those things with Java 8.

Spring might become less attractive as more people use Java EE7, which is as lightweight as you want it to be, or Play, but that has nothing to do with Java 8.

Independent of Java 8, you will surely see a shift away to JavaScript on the client. Fat Java clients and server-generated HTML views are not the future. Of course, it will take a good long time for them to fade away.

Cheers,

Cay

Cay Horstmann wrote:Fat Java clients and server-generated HTML views are not the future.

I've been saying this for some time, and continually get pushback that monstrosities like JSF are "the future".

I've given you 5 cows for agreeing with me.

Seriously, the 5 cows are for visiting us and gracing us with insights on Java 8 and your book. It's gonna be a good week on CodeRanch!