3.18 Converting Anonymous Inner Class to Lambda

Juppies 2 by Dr Heinz M. Kabutz

Java has often been accused of being too verbose. This has advantages and disadvantages. Its verbosity means that humans do not need to interpret what the code does - it is obvious for all to see.

Our anonymous inner classes are rather verbose. In the ORIGINAL_SCRAMBLER, we already know that we are making a Scrambler, because that is the type of the field declared on the left-hand side. So why do we have to repeat it? We also know that if there is only a single abstract method in the interface, it is very likely going to be this one that we are implementing. So why do we have to repeat the name of the interface in new Scrambler() and why do we need to explicitly state the name of the method scramble(char[] letters) when it is obvious that this would be the only method we could be implementing. We can deduce all that by just seeing that the type of the field is a Scrambler.

Since we have only one abstract method in our interface, we can replace the anonymous type with a lambda.

When making the lambda for the ORIGINAL_SCRAMBLER, we notice that we cannot put the curly braces and the comment on a single line. The reason is that when we write a comment with // anything on the right side of that is considered a comment, even our closing curly brace. This type of comment is called an end-of-line comment. We can also use a "traditional comment", which is like in C where we start with /* and end with */. By changing the comment we are able to wrap the comment with braces on a single line.

We also change the RANDOM_SCRAMBLER and the SORTED_SCRAMBLER to use lambdas instead of anonymous types.

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Table of Contents

• 0.1: Programming is a team sport - source control
• 0.2: Creating an account on GitHub
• 0.3: Forking the Juppies2 repository from kabutz
• 0.4: Oracle JDK
• 0.5: Oracle OpenJDK
• 0.6: Azul's Zulu OpenJDK
• 0.7: Installing the Oracle OpenJDK
• 0.8: Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
• 0.9: Downloading Apache NetBeans
• 0.10: Loading our Juppies2 Project in Apache NetBeans
• 0.11: Running the AnagramGame with Apache NetBeans
• 0.12: Downloading IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition
• 0.13: Installing IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition
• 0.14: Running the AnagramGame with IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition
• 0.15: Downloading and Installing Eclipse
• 0.16: Running the AnagramGame with Eclipse
• 1.1: AnagramGame Project Structure
• 1.2: WordLibrary
• 1.3: Swing User Interface (UI)
• 1.4: Buffer Overflows
• 1.5: Demo of New Word Button
• 1.6: Demo of Guess Button
• 1.7: StaticWordLibrary Structure
• 1.8: StaticWordLibrary Details
• 1.9: Changing the Size of Our StaticWordLibrary
• 1.10: How my Buffer Overflow Wiped my Colleague's Hard Disk
• 1.11: Adding Our Own Words to the StaticWordLibrary
• 1.12: WordLibraryTest With JUnit
• 1.13: Java's For Loop
• 1.14: Testing That Words Are Anagrams
• 1.15: Running JUnit
• 1.16: isAnagram() Method
• 1.17: Fixing StaticWordLibrary
• 1.18: WordLibraries Facade
• 1.19: Find Usages
• 1.20: Exercise
• 1.21: Commiting Changes
• 1.22: GitHub Repository
• 1.23: Pushing Commits to Remote Repository on GitHub
• 1.24: Until Next Time
• 2.1: Welcome back
• 2.2: Setting up NetBeans Git Toolbar
• 2.3: Creating a Git Branch for Today's Session
• 2.4: Typical Directory Structure Under Maven
• 2.5: NetBeans Magic Shortcuts
• 2.6: Avoid Copy & Paste Programming
• 2.7: Creating a ShuffledWordLibrary
• 2.8: Integer Array for Shuffled Indexes
• 2.9: Finishing the methods to delegate to the other WordLibrary
• 2.10: Trying out the "ShuffledWordLibrary" That Does Not Really Shuffle
• 2.11: Committing Our Changes to Git
• 2.12: Shuffling the Integer Array
• 2.13: Trying Out the Shuffled Anagram List
• 2.14: Committing our "shuffle" method
• 2.15: ArrayShuffler
• 2.16: Creating an ArrayShufflerTest
• 2.17: Printing the indexes array
• 2.18: Fixing Random to be more random
• 2.19: Extending the Tests
• 2.20: The Goat, The Wolf and The Cabbage (Swapping Integer Values)
• 2.21: Testing the Integer Swapping Code
• 2.22: Testing Before Running Application
• 2.23: Fixing the Integer Swapping Code
• 2.24: Integer Swapping With XOR
• 2.25: Value of Source Control Systems
• 2.26: Changed WordLibrary from an Abstract Class to an Interface
• 2.27: Commit and Push
• 2.28: Until Next Time
• 3.1: Welcome back
• 3.2: Create a new Git Branch
• 3.3: ScrambledWordLibrary
• 3.4: SortedScrambledWordLibrary
• 3.5: Committing Entire Project At Once
• 3.6: Creating a RandomScrambledWordLibrary
• 3.7: Adding a shuffle(char[]) method
• 3.8: Testing the shuffle() method
• 3.9: Scrambler Strategy Extracted
• 3.10: Rot13Scrambler
• 3.11: OriginalScrambler
• 3.12: Moving Scrambler Interface Into ScrambledWordLibary Using IntelliJ IDEA
• 3.13: Moving Shuffler Implementations Into ScrambledWordLibrary
• 3.14: Danger of Overusing Inner Classer
• 3.15: Testing Refactoring
• 3.16: Beauty of IDE Interoperability
• 3.17: Anonymous Inner Classes
• 3.18: Converting Anonymous Inner Class to Lambda
• 3.19: Expression Lambdas
• 3.20: Font Ligatures
• 3.21: Testing and Commiting Lambdas
• 3.22: Turning Rot13Scrambler into a Lambda
• 3.23: Method References
• 3.24: Making ArrayShuffler.shuffle() Methods static
• 3.25: Forcing Everyone To Use Static Methods
• 3.26: DecoratedWordLibrary
• 3.27: ScrambledWordLibrary as a Decorator
• 3.28: ShuffledWordLibrary as a Decorator
• 3.29: Cleaning Up the Concrete Decorators
• 3.30: Updated Copyright Notices
• 3.31: Make Classes Final Where Possible
• 3.32: Commit and Push
• 3.33: Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you did, you will also enjoy our courses. We suggest you start with Extreme Java - Advanced Java, followed by Extreme Java - Concurrency Performance for Java 8.