Towards more functional Java using Streams and Lambdas

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Scott Leberknight

In the last post I showed how the Java 7 try-with-resources feature reduces boilerplate code, but probably more importantly how it removes errors related to unclosed resources, thereby eliminating an entire class of errors. In this post, the first in an ad-hoc series on Java 8 features, I'll show how the stream API can reduce the lines of code, but also how it can make the code more readable, maintainable, and less error-prone.

The following code is from a simple back-end service that lets us query metadata about messages flowing through various systems. It takes a map of key-value pairs and creates a Lucene query that can be submitted to SOLR to obtain results. It is primarily used by developers to verify behavior in a distributed system, and it does not support very sophisticated queries, since it only ANDs the key-value pairs together to form the query. For example, given a parameter map containing the (key, value) pairs (lastName, Smith) and (firstName, Bob), the method would generate the query "lastName:Smith AND firstName:Bob". As I said, not very sophisticated.

Here is the original code (where AND, COLON, and DEFAULT_QUERY are constants):

public String buildQueryString(Map<String, String> parameters) {
    int count = 0;
    StringBuilder query = new StringBuilder();

    for (Map.Entry<String, String> entry : parameters.entrySet()) {
        if (count > 0) {
            query.append(AND);
        }
        query.append(entry.getKey());
        query.append(COLON);
        query.append(entry.getValue());
        count++;
    }

    if (parameters.size() == 0) {
        query.append(DEFAULT_QUERY);
    }

    return query.toString();
}

The core business logic should be very simple, since we only need to iterate the parameter map, join the keys and values with a colon, and finally join them together. But the code above, while not terribly hard to understand, has a lot of noise. First off, it uses two mutable variables (count and query) that are modified within the for loop. The first thing in the loop is a conditional that is needed to determine whether we need to append the AND constant, as we only want to do that after the first key-value pair is added to the query. Next, joining the keys and values is done by concatenating them, one by one, to the StringBuilder holding the query. Finally the count must be incremented so that in subsequent loop iterations, we properly include the AND delimiter. After the loop there is another conditional which appends DEFAULT_QUERY if there are no parameters, and then we finally convert the StringBuilder to a String and return it.

Here is the buildQueryString method after refactoring it to use the Java 8 stream API:

public String buildQueryString(Map<String, String> parameters) {
    if (parameters.isEmpty()) {
        return DEFAULT_QUERY;
    }

    return parameters.entrySet().stream()
            .map(entry -> String.join(COLON, entry.getKey(), entry.getValue()))
            .collect(Collectors.joining(AND));
}

This code does the exact same thing, but in only 6 lines of code (counting the map and collect lines as separate even though technically they are part of the stream call chain) instead of 15. But just measuring lines of code isn't everything. The main difference here is the lack of mutable variables, no external iteration via explicit looping constructs, and no conditional statements other than the empty check which short circuits and returns DEFAULT_QUERY when there are no parameters. The code reads like a functional declaration of what we want to accomplish: stream over the parameters, convert each (key, value) to "key:value" and join them all together using the delimiter AND.

The specific Java 8 features we've used here start with the stream() method to convert the map entry set to a Java 8 java.util.stream.Stream. We then use the map operation on the stream, which applies a function (String.join) to each element (Map.Entry) in the stream. Finally, we use the collect method to reduce the elements using the joining collector into the resulting string that is the actual query we wanted to build. In the map method we've also made use of a lambda expression to specify exactly what transformation to perform on each map entry.

By removing explicit iteration and mutable variables, the code is more readable, in that a developer seeing this code for the first time will have an easier and quicker time understanding what it does. Note that much of the how it does things has been removed, for example the iteration is now implicit via the Stream, and the joining collector now does the work of inserting a delimiter between the elements. You're now declaring what you want to happen, instead of having to explicitly perform all the tedium yourself. This is more of a functional style than most Java developers are used to, and at first it can be a bit jarring, but as you practice and get used to it, the more you'll probably like it and you'll find youself able to read and write this style of code much more quickly than traditional code with lots of loops and conditionals. Generally there is also less code than when using traditional looping and control structures, which is another benefit for maintenance. I won't go so far as to say Java 8 is a functional language like Clojure or Haskell - since it isn't - but code like this has a more functional flavor to it.

There is now a metric ton of content on the internet related to Java 8 streams, but in case this is all new to you, or you're just looking for a decent place to begin learning more in-depth, the API documentation for the java.util.stream package is a good place to start. Venkat Subramaniam's Functional Programming in Java is another good resource, and at less than 200 pages can be digested pretty quickly. And for more on lambda expressions, the Lambda Expressions tutorial in the official Java Tutorials is a decent place to begin. In the next post, we'll see another example where a simple Java 8 API addition combined with a lambda expression simplifies code, making it more readable and maintainable.

This blog was originally published on the Fortitude Technologies blog here.



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