Streams in Java 8
This post describes why streams were introduced in JAVA 8.
8/2/20233 min read
Java 8 introduced a revolutionary feature known as streams, which brought functional programming capabilities to the Java language. Streams provide an elegant and efficient way to process data in a declarative manner, allowing developers to focus on what needs to be done rather than how it should be done.
1. Introduction:
Java 8 marked a significant milestone in Java's evolution by introducing streams, a new addition to the Java Collections Framework. Streams provide an abstraction to process data in a functional programming paradigm, enabling developers to efficiently perform operations on collections and arrays while promoting concise, expressive, and readable code.
2. Understanding Streams:
A stream in Java 8 represents a sequence of elements from a data source on which multiple operations can be performed without modifying the original data source. It does not store data but processes the data from the underlying collection or array on-demand. Streams are designed to be a more concise and declarative alternative to the traditional iteration-based approaches like for-each loops.
3. Creating Streams:
Streams can be created from various data sources, including collections, arrays, or even directly from individual elements using factory methods in the `Stream` class. Two static methods used to create streams are Stream.of() and Stream.ofNullable().ofNullable acts as substitute for null checks that we have to do if we are receiving data from an external source.
ArrayList<Employee> empList=new ArrayList<Employee>();
empList.stream().forEach(i->System.out.println("age of employee"+i.getAge()));
4. Key Characteristics of Streams:
- Lazy Evaluation: Streams use lazy evaluation, none of the intermediate operations are executed until their result is required. This ensures efficiency by avoiding unnecessary computation.
- Pipelining: Streams chain multiple intermediate operations like map and filter, the output of one operation is a stream which is fed as input to another stream forming a pipeline of operations.
- Stateless and Non-Mutating: Streams are stateless and do not modify the original data source. Instead, they produce new streams or collections as output, leaving the original data unchanged.
5. Stream Operations:
- Intermediate Operations: These operations are used to transform, filter, or reorder the elements of a stream and return another stream as a result. Examples include `map`, `filter`, `sorted`, and `distinct`.
- Terminal Operations: Terminal operations mark the end of a stream pipeline and produce a final result or a side effect. Examples include `collect`, `forEach`, `reduce`, and `count`.
6. Advantages of Streams:
- Concise and Readable Code: Streams allow developers to express complex data processing tasks more succinctly, leading to cleaner and more readable code.
- Declarative Programming: Streams enable a declarative style of programming where developers describe what should be done, rather than how it should be done. This makes code more maintainable and easier to reason about.
- Parallel Processing: Streams can be easily parallelized, enabling efficient multi-core utilization and significantly improving performance for large data sets.
7. Stream vs. Collection API:
- Mutability: Collections are variables used to store group of objects, whereas streams do not store data but perform operations on them.
- Eager vs. Lazy Evaluation: Collections use eager evaluation, meaning all elements are computed and stored immediately, while streams adopt lazy evaluation, processing elements on-demand.
- Infinite Collections: Streams can handle infinite collections efficiently, thanks to their lazy nature, whereas traditional collections may lead to memory overflow.
8. Examples of Stream Operations:
-sorted:They sort the elements based on the comparator passed .For example sorting all the employees based on the age.
- Filtering: They are used to extract specific elements from a stream based on a specific condition.
- Mapping: They are used to transform elements from one type to another using a provided function.
- Reducing: They are used to combine elements of a stream into a single result using an associative function.
- Grouping: They are used to group elements of a stream based on a common property ,for example employee class objects can be grouped based on department property.
-peek: They are used to perform multiple operations on each object in stream, each operation resulting in stream which is fed to the next operation.
-findFirst: It is a terminal short-circuiting operation which returns an optional containing the first element of the stream or an empty optional if the stream is empty.
9. Conclusion:
Streams in Java 8 have revolutionized the way developers process and manipulate data, making code more concise, expressive, and maintainable. By leveraging the power of functional programming and taking advantage of lazy evaluation and parallel processing, streams offer significant performance improvements for data-intensive applications.