Googlielmo's blog

I have just released the version 0.2 of jolokiaui ( https://github.com/virtualramblas/jolokiaui ), a web client for the Jolokia JVM agent ( https://jolokia.org/agent/jvm.html ) to monitor local and remote JVMs. It is implemented in R ( https://www.r-project.org/ ) using the Shiny framework ( http://shiny.rstudio.com/ ).  The current release is still an alpha, but new features would be added in the next months. Any feedback is welcome. Enjoy it.

One of the most useful things introduced by Java 8 is the Optional class ( https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html ). It is a container object that wraps either a value or null , to represent the absence of a value. You can quickly understand the benefits coming from it: a better way to handle the existence of null values with no need to explicitly check for nulls and possibly less chance to have NullPointerException exceptions. Some code like this // The method call below could return null User currentUser = getUser(id); Role role = null; if(currentUser != null) {   role = getRole(currentUser); } becomes: Optional<User> currentUser = Optional.ofNullable(getUser(id)); Optional<Role> role = currentUser.map(u -> getRole(currentUser));