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Fast Track to Java 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dates: Monday 30th April – Friday 4th May

Number of Days: 5 days

Venue: Maryborough Hotel, Douglas, Cork

Training Provider: Instil

Member fee: €900

Non-member fee: €1500

To register interest or to book a place on this course please email Annette Coburn on skillnet@itcork.ie

 

Introduction

 

This is an intensive course designed to introduce software developers to the Java ecosystem in general and the Java 9 language in particular. All four programming styles supported by Java are covered in depth, but with a particular emphasis on the functional style and its growing importance to both parallel and cloud computing.

 

The course is aimed primarily at three groups:

 

  • Experienced coders who will be moving into Java from other languages
  • Developers who need an update to the new features in Java 8 and 9
  • Graduates looking to consolidate knowledge gained through academia

 

In addition to the core language topics, the course also covers a variety of the skills required on modern Java / JEE projects, these being:

 

  • Reactive programming via frameworks like Project Reactor
  • Test Driven Development via tools like JUnit and Mockito
  • Behaviour Driven Development using Cucumber
  • Writing scripts in Groovy and using Groovy DSL’s

 

Course Modules

Introducing the Java Landscape

  • Origins and goals of the Java language
  • Bytecode and the Java Virtual Machine
  • Distinguishing between JME and Android
  • Where Microservices and the JEE diverge
  • Popular languages on the Java platform

Essential JVM Concepts

  • Types, packages and archives (JAR/WAR/EAR)
  • References and tuning Garbage Collection
  • Hierarchical class loading and Agents
  • The CLASSPATH environment variable
  • The new Module System in Java 9

Basic Java Programming

  • Primitive types and literal values
  • Java syntax for binary and numeric literals
  • The difference between reference and value types
  • Converting between strings and numerical types
  • Parsing console input with the Scanner class
  • Pretty-printing with the Formatter class
  • Performing iteration and selection in Java
  • Support for strings in switch statements
  • Equality with primitive and reference types
  • Creating and manipulating arrays
  • The costs of string concatenation

Object Oriented Development – Part 1

  • Creating basic Java classes
  • Choosing accessibility levels
  • Inheriting from a base class
  • Overloading and overriding methods
  • Comparisons using the instanceof operator
  • Comparisons using lang.Class objects
  • Creating abstract and final classes

Object Oriented Development – Part 2

  • Writing appropriate class constructors
  • Private constructors and singletons
  • Static and instance initialization blocks
  • Top down class and object initialization
  • Declaring and implementing interfaces
  • Using inner and anonymous classes
  • Implementing equals and hashCode
  • Cloning and copy constructors

Enumerations

  • Why Java historically lacked enum support
  • The Typesafe Enumeration Design Pattern
  • How Java 5 baked the pattern into the language
  • Extending enums with new members
  • Helper methods added to enum types
  • Collections which support enums

Annotations and Meta-Programming

  • Adding metadata to Java code
  • The advantages of annotations
  • Annotations verses configuration files
  • Declaring Java 5 annotation types
  • Understanding meta-annotations
  • Adding methods to annotation types
  • Defining default values for methods
  • Discovering annotations with reflection
  • Writing annotation processors in Java 6
  • Enhancements to annotations in Java 8

Functional Programming with Method References and Lambdas

  • Overview of the key concepts of Functional Programming
  • The concept of ‘method references’ in the language and JVM
  • Creating references to methods, static methods and constructors
  • Understanding when and why to use lambda expressions
  • The various syntax options when declaring lambdas
  • Making use of the @FunctionalInterface annotation
  • Lexical scoping and ‘effectively final’ variables
  • Support for type inference of parameters in lambdas
  • Best practices when declaring and using lambdas

Introducing the Collections API

  • Introducing lists, sets and maps
  • Using iterators and enumerations
  • Choosing the most efficient collections
  • Specialized collections in other packages
  • Collections designed for concurrent access
  • Open source alternatives to regular collections

Functional Programming With Collections and Streams

  • Introducing the util.stream.Stream interface
  • Different ways of creating streams of objects
  • How Optional helps eliminate null pointer exceptions
  • Using parallel and sequential to switch processing model
  • Performing filtering and mapping on a streams content
  • Using reduce to compute a final value from a stream
  • Understanding the purpose and value of flatMap
  • The collect method and its many different applications
  • Enhancements to the streams library in Java 9
  • Support for Reactive Programming in Java 9
  • Taking Rx further via Project Reactor

Exception Handling in Java

  • Introducing errors, runtime exceptions and checked exceptions
  • Special consideration for exceptions in constructors and finalizers
  • Implementing an effective exception handling strategy
  • Using finally blocks properly to perform ‘clean-up’ tasks
  • Java 7 improvements to the try…catch syntax
  • The try-with-resources syntax introduced in Java 7

Generics in Java

  • Introducing Type Parameters and generic code
  • Understanding reified vs. non-reified Generics
  • Generics is a compile time feature in Java
  • Declaring generic classes and methods
  • Type inference when creating generic types
  • Creating your own generic collection classes
  • Support for Generics in the Reflection API
  • Using the wildcard type in utility methods
  • Defining constraints with bounded wildcards
  • Making sense of upper and lower bounds
  • Common confusions with wildcards
  • How compilers perform Type Erasure

The Date and Time API

  • How JSR310 evolved from the Joda Time library
  • Working with instants, clocks and time zones
  • Performing calculations with dates and times
  • Using adjusters to make common changes to dates
  • Parsing and formatting dates and times
  • Combining the API with legacy code

TDD in Java with JUnit and Mockito

  • Defining your intent through tests
  • Writing just enough code to pass
  • Adding tests and refining the code
  • Testing up to the point of boredom
  • Triangulating on hard problems
  • Moving up and down the gears
  • You aren’t going to need it (YAGNI)
  • Why encapsulated dependencies are bad
  • Using DI to isolate dependencies
  • Creating and injecting Test Doubles
  • Situations where TDD will not work

Behaviour Driven Development in Java with Cucumber

  • How BDD evolved from Test Driven Development
  • Writing scenarios using the Gherkin syntax
  • Moving shared steps into a background section
  • Embedding data tables within scenarios
  • Setting up JUnit to run and configure Cucumber
  • Creating a class to hold step definitions
  • Writing step definitions via annotations in Java 6
  • Writing step definitions via lambdas in Java 8
  • Matching to the content of steps via regex
  • Using sub-matches to capture input values
  • How cucumber converts and tokenizes inputs
  • Reading and extracting values from data tables

Java Concurrency Fundamentals

  • The threading model in Java prior to version 5
  • Creating threads using Executor objects
  • Storing return values in Future objects
  • Designing parallel algorithms using the ‘fork-join’ framework
  • Lock objects as an alternative to the synchronized keyword
  • Making full use of the ‘thread-friendly’ collection classes
  • Scalable thread-safe counters in util.concurrent
  • Parallel array sorting using methods in util.Arrays

Scripting on the JVM with Groovy

  • Support for both static and dynamic typing
  • Options for quoting and interpolation in strings
  • Special operators not found in the Java language
  • Enhancements to the switch statement and pattern matching
  • Flexible method declarations and inferred return types
  • Built in support for collections and helpful idioms
  • Creating objects from tables and specifying fields by name
  • Using traits to extend classes and also objects at runtime
  • How properties are generated and accessing fields directly
  • Understanding and making use of multi-methods in Groovy
  • Supporting indexing and operator overloading on your types
  • Declaring and using closures in Groovy scripts
  • What this, owner and delegate mean in closures
  • Specifying closures as inputs and outputs from methods
  • Built in support for currying and partial invocation
  • When and how to convert methods into closures
  • Wrapping methods in closures to perform memoization

 

To register interest or to book a place on this course please email Annette Coburn on skillnet@itcork.ie