Better Java – Resources for Writing Modern Java

Well, I was an English major, so I'm glad you were engaged by the "diatribe". And if you were unable to piece it together... and I kinda feel bad if you couldn't. I'm referring to Java 8 language features and OpenJDK 1.8. I get the feeling you knew that though and are being pedantic. You've succeeded though, because I responded.

Sadly you missed the part where I said, "Not all Java devs obviously". I have read great blogs by Twitter engineering and many others.

But, since you seem to have some experience in sweatshops, please explain how your current situation is different. Add something to this conversation instead of correcting my stupid generalizations.

I see the lack of unit tests constantly. I did a small stint with PHP and one of the first things I did was learn PHPUnit. Having invested heavily in the TDD Koolaid with Rails/Python, I made sure I learned how to apply the same ideas in PHP. And yes, I've seen quite a bit of the "1999 was just fine" culture among PHP developers too. If you can't deploy your code at the touch of a button, you should be working your way to that goal.

This is a really great resource and I'll certainly be embracing some of it.

I attend quite a few university hackathons as a mentor/sponsor and one of my goals has been to paint Java in a better light as it doesn't have the best reputation in that circuit. I'm always telling people that their goal should be to build something cool and learn something new.

It's much easier to teach someone how to build their first webapp in a weekend when you can do it in a language that they are familiar with and Java seems to be what's taught at most universities.

The Spark Framework mentioned here is very well done and beginner friendly. I recently wrote an intro blog post [0] about it as an attempt to embrace existing knowledge and showcase that it's easy to build something cool with Java.

0: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/09/getting-started-with-gra...

As a Java Dev of 15 years, through my own experience, almost all of these points I have discovered through hard fought bugs and trying to find a way to reduce the causes of them in the future.

Final by default is the biggest, bc it removes some of the most basic concurrency errors implicitly. Awesome post. It also is pointing out things that in some other languages (e.g. Python) are implicitly impossible to achieve, and others which some new languages (e.g. Rust) have built in from the beginning, like never use null.

Well done.

Constructor calling is readable either with an IDE, or using distinctive types. If the constructor is unclear, it's a smell.

I'd also say that making circular dependencies not possible is a feature, not a bug. They go against everything we've learned about computing in the last 20 years. Entire languages do not have variables, or at least heavily discourage them, and the gains outweigh the costs.

Setter dependencies have other major disadvantages, like how easy they make creating partially initialized objects: Refactor something in one place, adding a parameter, and good luck making sure that the change is made everywhere else. A constructor guarantees fully initialized objects, and that's a great things.

Java pays for the mistakes of the early 2000s: The Java Bean pattern, and all the infrastructure around it, makes Java code be full of default constructors that force us into mutable objects and nullable fields.

If there is a defense for your argument for setter dependencies, is that we cannot count on any of the nice things that come with, say a Scala case class, because so much Java code out there is built with standards from a less enlightened era that using what would be better standards in any more modern language leads to inconsistencies, due to all the ancient code using Spring, Hibernate, Guava and EJB code that is hanging out there, and that would lead to inconsistencies for those trying to make Java actually use some of its new functional programming inspired features.