Lots of interesting writeups on Java 9 this week.

Here we go…

1. Spring and Java

The new Spring 5 will not only be compatible with Kotlin but actually, treat the language as a first-class citizen – which is very cool.

The introduction of JPMS solves some problems but brings its own set of challenges. Let's have a look at some of these.

Spring 5 definitely takes a step towards the reactive and functional approaches to building an application.

The newest version of IntelliJ IDEA comes with a bunch of very interesting small features.

RxJava has some corner cases not to be ignored – this writeup deals with an on-demand eager evaluation of Flowables.

Last but certainly not list, if you'd like to contribute – I'm currently looking for two new authors for the site. Get in touch if you'd like to know how that works.

Also worth reading:

Webinars and presentations:

Time to upgrade:

2. Technical

Docker good practices are always welcome.

Another interesting approach to dealing with exceptions.

We, as an industry, haven't been doing a particularly good job working with errors and exceptions, so there's certainly room for improvement here.

Also worth reading:

3. Musings

Blockchain technologies are getting more and more popular, but there are some challenges that will need to be faced, as the recent problems made it abundantly clear.

An interesting case study of transitioning from a full-time employee to a one-man consulting company.

Also worth reading:

4. Comics

And my favorite Dilberts of the week:

5. Pick of the Week