The Method Handles API was first introduced in Java 7 (almost 15 years ago) but despite this maturity, seems not to have fully permeated into the collective consciousness of developers. Instead, the ancient Reflection API is still more familiar, despite its serious shortcomings.

In this talk, Ben will explain what Method Handles are used for, how they differ from Reflection and why they are an extremely useful tool for modern advanced Java programming. We'll cover:

• Method types & Lookups
• Method & Var Handles
• Lambda expressions
• Replacing Unsafe
• Rewiring the internals of Reflection

To conclude the talk, we'll look at a set of use cases where Method Handles are an excellent general-purpose tool for building dynamic capabilities in Java.

This 2-day bootcamp provides an in-depth exploration of concurrency on the Java platform.

We'll cover a wide range of practical and theoretical topics including:

• CPU Hardware and Multicore
• Synchronization
• Lost Update
• Executors & Threadpools
• Concurrent Data Structures
• Advanced Concurrency Libraries
• Concurrency Internals
• Virtual Threads
• Scoped Values & Structured Concurrency

The upcoming session on the State of Java in 2026 will cover:

• The "on-ramp" for new Java programmers
• Concurrency & Virtual Threads
• Java Foreign Function Interface
• Classfile API
• What's next

Looking ahead, we will discuss selected upcoming features, such as nullability, laziness, typeclasses, pattern matching, the Vector API and Project Valhalla.