Staying up to date with Modern Java can feel overwhelming. If you don’t have any experience with recent Java versions (or at all), features like Structured Concurrency or Stream Gatherers might sound exciting, but also scary: “How do I even get started with that?”

Fear not! In this session Marit and Piotr will explain to you the new exciting things and also show you how to use them in your IDE, so that the next day you can start having fun and profit with modern Java in your favorite tools on your own.

Devoxx

A conference talk transcript covering modern Java features from Java 16 through Java 25, demonstrated via a live image search application using Elasticsearch and vector embeddings. Key features covered include: records (Java 16), compact source files and instance main methods (JEP 445), module imports, stream gatherers (custom intermediate stream operations), structured concurrency as a cleaner alternative to CompletableFuture, markdown documentation comments (Java 23), pattern matching with primitive types in switch expressions, and the Vector API (Project Panama incubator). The demo shows refactoring Java 8-style code to modern idioms using IntelliJ IDEA, and briefly touches on using AI coding assistants to generate Vector API implementations.

Learning modern Java the playful way by Marit van Dijk and Piotr Przybył