Recently I gave a talk that included a slide where I briefly discussed single return vs multiple returns. The purpose of this slide was only to give an example of a dogma and basically had nothing to do with the rest of the talk. Therefore it was kinda funny to see that this particular slide caused a lot of discussion afterwards, so it seems natural to write a blog about this topic.

So…​ should a function only have a single return statement or is it better to allow multiple returns?

If we have an Optional instance we can consume the value if it is present using the ifPresent method. Since Java 9 the method ifPresentOrElse has been added to the Optional class. The first argument is of type Consumer and is invoked when there is an optional value. The second argument is of type Runnable and is executed when the the optional is empty. The method in the Consumer and Runnable implementations does not return a type but returns void. Therefore we should use ifPresentOrElse when we need a conditional side effect for an Optional instance.

In the following example we have a method handleName that will update a list if an optional value is present or increases a counter when the optional value is empty:

Outside the Java community, Java is often regarded as an old and verbose language. Though I love writing Java code, I kind of have to agree with this. New features are implemented slowly and looked upon by the language designers with thorough suspicion. For example, support for multi-line strings has been tried multiple times before Java got official support^[1]. If we are talking about verbosity, the Java language needs quite some characters to write a simple function. As I am specializing in functional programming in Java this year, I struggled a lot with this. Read along how I tackled this a little.

If we want to get two types of information from a Stream of objects we can consume the Stream twice and collect the results. But that is not very efficient, especially when the stream has a lot of objects. Since Java 12 we can use the teeing method of the java.util.stream.Collectors class to get multiple results while consuming the stream of objects only once. The teeing method takes two collectors as argument each returning a separate result for the stream items. As third argument we must pass a function that will merge the results of the two collectors into a new object.

In the following code we have two example use cases that use the teeing method to get multiple results while consuming a Stream of objects only one time:

Our team has a (not so) slight tendency to not immediately follow through with our deployments to production. We’ll create and review our changes, merge and deploy to staging, and dilligently test the changes there. And then…​ nothing happens.

It could be that something else needs our immediate attention, or someone else wants to confirm an issue is fixed; Or we might want to deploy at a different point in time as to not disrupt an ongoing process by a service restart. Any which way the result is the same: changes accumulate in staging, and with that the risk involved with the next production deployment.

To nudge ourselves to deploy to production more often we created a Slack App that gives us a daily report of such pending deployments. In this post I’ll showcase the code we use, and how to set up something similar yourself.

Java 15 introduced the multi-line string value referred to as a text block. With this introduction also the formatted method was added to the String class. The method can be invoked on a String value directly and function exactly as the static String.format method. The nice thing is that now we directly can use a method on the value instead of having to use a static method where the value is passed as argument.

In the following example we use the formatted method for a normal String value and a text block:

In Java 12 the transform method was add to the String class. This method accepts a Function as argument. The function must have a single parameter of type String and can return any other type. The nice thing is that it works on a String instance, so we can directly use the transform method when we have a String value. We don’t have to pass the String object to another method to tranform it, but we can define the tranformation function close to the String value.

In the following example we take a String value and apply some functions with the transform method:

Since Java 12 we can format numbers in a compact style with the CompactNumberFormat class in the java.text package. A number like 23000 is formatted as 23K for the English locale. Instead of the short representation of K for 1000 we can also use a longer style where K is transformed as thousand for the English locale. We can use the same class to parse a String value that is in the compact style into a number.

In the following example we use several options of the CompactNumberFormat class:

In Java we can merge a key/value pair into a Map with the merge method. The first parameter is the key, the second the value and the third parameter of the merge method is a remapping function that is applied when the key is already present in the Map instance. The remapping function has the value of the key in the original Map and the new value. We can define in the function what the resulting value should be. If we return null the key is ignored.

If we want to merge multiple Map instances we can use the Stream API. We want to convert the Map instances to a stream of Map.Entry instances which we then turn into a new Map instance with the toMap method from the class Collectors. The toMap method also takes a remapping function when there is a duplicate key. The function defines what the new value is based on the two values of the duplicate key that was encountered. We can choose to simply ignore one of the values and return the other value. But we can also do some computations in this function, for example creating a new value using both values.

In Java we can write single argument functions that implement the java.util.function.Function interface. We can combine multiple functions into a new function using the andThen and compose methods from the Function interface. We need to give another function as argument to these methods. When we use the andThen method the output of the original function will be input of the function passed as argument. With the compose method our function will get as input the output of the function that is passed as argument. It is important to know the difference, because it can change the result of the function we are composing. The andThen and compose methods are also available on the IntUnaryOperator, LongUnaryOperator and DoubleUnaryOperator interface.

In the following example we use both andThen and compose to chain together some functions. We can see the result can be different when using andThen and compose with the same functions.

The Java Stream API has many useful methods. If we want to partition a stream of objects by a given predicate we can use the partitioningBy() method from the java.util.stream.Collectors package. We must use this method in the collect() method of the stream. The result is a Map with the keys true and false. The objects from the stream that are true for the predicate will end up in the true value list and if the result of the predicate is false the value will end up in the list of values for the false key. The partitionBy method accepts a collector as second parameter. This collector will be applied to the values before they are put in the true or false keys in the result.

In the following example we use the partitioningBy method with different streams:

The Java Stream API has many useful methods. If we want to transform a Stream to a Java array we can use the toArray method. Without an argument the result is an object array (Object[]), but we can also use an argument to return an array of another type. The easiest way is to use the contructor of the array type we want as method reference. Then the result is an array of the given type with the elements of the stream.

This is very useful if we have a Java Stream and want to use the elements to invoke a method with a variable arguments parameter. In Java we can pass an array object as variable arguments argument to a method. So if we transform the Stream to an array we can invoke the method with that value.