As many of you are aware, Oracle released JDK 9 on 21st September, 2017. According to Oracle, this is the biggest release in Java history after JDK 5 & JDK 8.
JDK 9 has lot of interesting new features that will change the way developers code. I would liketo list of some cool, new features in JDK 9 that every developer should be aware of. This is list This list is an overview. For more detailed information, please review the release notes on the JDK 9 web page.
Behind the Scenes Improvements
These are improvements we can leverage just by moving to JDK 9. We need not to recompile our code in order to move – JDK 8 compiled code can run on JDK 9. These are mostly performance and memory usage improvements.
- Store Interned Strings in CDS Archives
- Compact Strings
- Improve Secure Application Performance
- Tiered Attribution for javac
- javadoc Search
New Functionalities
These are new tools and capabilities in JDK 9:
- Jigsaw -Modularize JDK
- Enhanced Deprecation
- Convenience factory methods for Collections
- Platform Logging API and Service
- JShell: Java Shell
- Compiler for older platform versions
- Multi-release jar files
New Standards support
These standards are already implemented by different technology groups. JDK 9 has support for them.
- HTTP 2 Client
- Unicode 8.0 support
- UTF-8 Property files
- HTML 5 Javadoc
Housekeeping Features
These features are for setting up future improvement in JDK and reducing some complexity.
- Modular Java Application Packaging
- New Version-String Scheme
- Make G1 the default Garbage Collector
- Validate JVM Command Line Flag arguments
- Deprecate the Applet API
- Process import statements correctly
- Encapsulate Most Internal API
- Indify String Concatenation
- Filter Incoming Serialization data
Note: These are just some important new features in JDK 9, but there are many more. I encourage everyone here to try all these JDK 9 features by installing JDK 9 in their machine.
Last updated: March 22, 2023
