When Oracle acquired Sun, the next planned release of Java was version 7. At the time, this release contained a huge amount of new functionality - lambda expressions, modularity, a new garbage collector and much more. The delivery turned out to be a little different - the size and complexity of the features meant that they had to arrive over 3 major versions of Java.

This training day will bring attendees up to speed on what's changed in the last releases of Java. We'll cover all of the headline features from 7 and 8, and look at what's coming in 9 and the roadmap beyond. You'll meet lambdas, streams, the new collections and IO libraries, the updated concurrency and the new date and time libraries. At language level, we'll discuss what the arrival of default methods means for API designers.

Looking ahead, we'll take a long look at modularity and what has changed in the codebase, and what modularity will mean for application deployment. We'll discuss exactly why modularity has been so complex to implement, and compare the strategies of moving to Java 8 now versus waiting for 9. Not only that, but we'll dive deep and see how new low-level features such as invokedynamic and ForkJoin have been essential to implementing the changes in the platform.

Finally, if you're a developer who's still stuck running on Java 6, this day will also let you know what risks you're exposed to and give you the facts to inform your team of the need (and advantages) of upgrading.

Key takeaways:

• Learn new features of Java 8 - including lambdas and streams
• Understand the big changes coming in Java 9
• See how the new features of Java are implemented using new functionality delivered in Java 7
• Recognize risks associated with running applications on legacy Java platforms (6 and below)