Java SE 8 features

We will scratch the surface of Java SE 8 to understand two of the most important features – lambda or lambda expressions and functional interfaces, which make the lambdas available to us, to help write better, concise, and low-boilerplate JavaFX 8 code. However, keep in mind that we will not address every lambda detail in this book, as this is not a Java SE 8 book.

Note

To get a better idea of Java's lambda roadmap, visit the following official tutorial: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/lambdaexpressions.html.

Lambda expressions

The primary goal of project lambda in the Java language is to address the lack of functional programming and provide a way to do functional programming easily by creating anonymous (unnamed) functions in a similar manner to creating anonymous objects instead of methods in Java.

As you saw in the example from Chapter 1, Getting Started with JavaFX 8, we talked about the usual approach for defining a handler for the pressed...