Simplifying functional programming in Java.

Funk is a library of functional utilities to aid in writing Java in a functional style. It currently supports the following main features:

• Lazy and eager higher order functions for manipulating collections such as map, reduce, zip, filter, take and drop.
• A full suite of function interfaces for representing different arities of functions, predicates and procedures.
• Collection literals and builders for assembling collections from various sources.
• Monadic types such as Option and Either.
• Generically typed tuples of different lengths for representing arbitrary records in a type safe manner.
• Generators for generating potentially infinite streams of objects satisfying particular semantics.

One of the most commonly used features of Funk is the collection manipulation functions. As an example, consider an online catalogue that contains a collection of Product instances. Each product instance has a number of associated Variant instances representing different colours or sizes. To obtain a collection containing all possible variants, we first need to map each Product to its collection of Variants:

Iterable<Product> products = database.getAllProducts();
Iterable<Iterable<Variant>> productVariants = Lazily.map(products, new Mapper<Product, Iterable<Variant>>() {
  @Override public Iterable<Variant> map(Product product) {
    return product.getVariants();
  }
});

Once we have the Variant collections, to obtain a flattened collection of those variants, we need to concatenate:

Iterable<Variant> allVariants = Iterables.concat(productVariants);

And finally, to get the set of all unique variants, we can convert the Iterable to a Set:

Set<Variant> uniqueVariants = Literals.setFrom(allVariants);

Whilst this example is slightly contrived, this manner of collection manipulation is common in many different use cases. It is important to note:

• The mapping is performed lazily as is the concatenation of the Iterable instances. Thus, no collection manipulation is actually performed until the Iterable is iterated to construct the final Set.
• All operations leave the input collections unchanged and represent pure functions.

For more information see the project wiki or the Javadoc documentation.

The latest released version of Funk is 0.1.13 which can be obtained from Maven Central.

The highest priority future features are outlined below:

• Full Javadoc documentation of the public API (required before 1.0).
• Extended collection interfaces and implementations to allow a more fluid approach to performing collection manipulations for those projects that prefer not to use static methods so frequently.
• Immutability as a first class concern.
• Function base classes and manipulation methods such as composition and partial evaluation.

Funk is always looking for contributors so if you find it useful please consider fixing an issue. The issue page is used to track all feature requests and bugs. To contribute, fork the main repository, make your changes on a branch and make a pull request from that branch.

See the contributors page.

The BSD License.