Modern Java with IntelliJ IDEA

How can IntelliJ IDEA help us to keep up with Java?

Abstract

The current release cadence of a new version of Java every 6 months can be overwhelming. The releases might even contain preview features which are "complete" but may change with every new release until they finally stabilize. How can a real developer keep up with this? The good news is that your IDE can help. IntelliJ IDEA not only provides support for the latest versions of Java (even the ones that aren't released yet), it can also help us to discover and use the new language features. This way we can let the IDE help us to migrate to the latest and greatest, and we don't need to go researching for the relevant features every 6 months. In this session, Trisha will show the interesting language features in recent versions of Java, and show how IntelliJ IDEA makes these really easy to find and use.

Slides

Resources

Features

Java 15

Java 14

Java 13

Java 12

  • Java 12 and IntelliJ IDEA blog and video - how IntelliJ IDEA can help you with the new switch expression syntax (available in IntelliJ IDEA 2019.1 and later)
  • All JDK 12 JEPs - includes several related to Garbage Collection

Java 11

Java 10

Java 9

Upgrading from Java 8

Performance

Improved performance (especially if it's "out of the box", without needing extra work) can be a good business motivator for upgrading.

See Also

My Beyond Java 8 talk gives a broader perspective on the changes since Java 8 - licensing, support, features (not just those that IntelliJ IDEA can help with), garbage collectors, and so on.

Author

  • Trisha Gee

    Trisha is a software engineer, Java Champion and author. Trisha has developed Java applications for finance, manufacturing and non-profit organisations, and she's a lead developer advocate at Gradle.

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