Hidden Features of Java

Answer 1

i personally discovered java.lang.Void very late -- improves code readability in conjunction with generics, e.g. Callable<Void>

Answer 2

Double Brace Initialization took me by surprise a few months ago when I first discovered it, never heard of it before.

ThreadLocals are typically not so widely known as a way to store per-thread state.

Since JDK 1.5 Java has had extremely well implemented and robust concurrency tools beyond just locks, they live in java.util.concurrent and a specifically interesting example is the java.util.concurrent.atomic subpackage that contains thread-safe primitives that implement the compare-and-swap operation and can map to actual native hardware-supported versions of these operations.

Answer 3

Dynamic proxies (added in 1.3) allow you to define a new type at runtime that conforms to an interface. It's come in handy a surprising number of times.

Answer 4

My vote goes to java.util.concurrent with its concurrent collections and flexible executors allowing among others thread pools, scheduled tasks and coordinated tasks. The DelayQueue is my personal favorite, where elements are made available after a specified delay.

java.util.Timer and TimerTask may safely be put to rest.

Also, not exactly hidden but in a different package from the other classes related to date and time. java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit is useful when converting between nanoseconds, microseconds, milliseconds and seconds.

It reads a lot better than the usual someValue * 1000 or someValue / 1000.

Answer 5

Classpath wild cards since Java 6.

java -classpath ./lib/* so.Main

Instead of

java -classpath ./lib/log4j.jar:./lib/commons-codec.jar:./lib/commons-httpclient.jar:./lib/commons-collections.jar:./lib/myApp.jar so.Main

See http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/windows/classpath.html

Answer 6

Using this keyword for accessing fields/methods of containing class from an inner class. In below, rather contrived example, we want to use sortAscending field of container class from the anonymous inner class. Using ContainerClass.this.sortAscending instead of this.sortAscending does the trick.

import java.util.Comparator;

public class ContainerClass {
boolean sortAscending;
public Comparator createComparator(final boolean sortAscending){
    Comparator comparator = new Comparator<Integer>() {

        public int compare(Integer o1, Integer o2) {
            if (sortAscending || ContainerClass.this.sortAscending) {
                return o1 - o2;
            } else {
                return o2 - o1;
            }
        }

    };
    return comparator;
}
}