Ken Kousen on Java, Spring, and Groovy

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Ken Kousen, an author, instructor, and consultant who is presenting the live online training courses Functional Programming in Java 8 and Getting Started with Spring Boot in September and October. He is also the author of the newly published O’Reilly book Modern Java Recipes: Simple Solutions to Difficult Problems in Java 8 and 9.

Discussion points:

• The impact of Java 8’s functional programming-related changes, including Lambda expressions, method references, and streams
• The issues surrounding Project Jigsaw and Java modularization in the forthcoming release of Java 9. “The biggest issue that will affect the open source world and your own code is that public and private no longer really mean what they sound like they should mean,” Kousen says. “This has widespread ramifications, especially for library developers.”
• Why learning Groovy is easy for Java developers: “You don’t have to change any of your existing Java code to adopt Groovy,” Kousen says. “You can simply add a Groovy module, and the Groovy compiler understands how to compile Java.”
• What’s new in the upcoming releases of Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2

Other links:

• The live online training course Groovy Programming for Java Developers, presented by Ken Kousen on October 25-26, 2017
• The series of videos on Grails 3, including Starting a Grails 3 Project and Understanding the Grails 3 Domain Model, presented by Ken Kousen
• The book Gradle Recipes for Android by Ken Kousen
• The Groovy Podcast, hosted by Ken Kousen and Baruch Sadogursky