Java 8

Wow, have I really not posted anything since January?

I'm coming up to speed on Java 8.  I've been working in Groovy for like a year and a half so these concepts are not new, but the syntax is just different enough that I have to think about it.

Here is some code I wrote a while back.  It is a solution to a Cracking the Coding Interview problem to write a boolean method taking two strings as input and returning whether one string is a permutation of the other (same characters in a different order):


This is basically Java 6 the way we've been writing it for the last 10 years or so.

isPermutation stays the same so I'll just be showing changes to signature.

Use a Java 8 lambda and a stream to iterate through the String.  Note the use of String.chars() returning an IntStream which is where the stream comes from.  You'd think there's be a CharStream, but no, so I'm using a rather awkward conversion to get the int back to a char:

Not a big improvement so far... next I use the cool new Map.getOrDefault() to replace 7 lines of code with one:

That is starting to be some more expressive and maintainable code... finally there's nothing sacred about the signature being implemented as a Map<Character,Integer>, so let's change that to Map<Integer,Integer> which will make it possible to remove the awkward int to char conversion and make the lambda body an expression rather than a block: