Despite its controversy, Optional has greatly improved the design of Java applications. See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.

In addition, Optional forces you to actively unwrap an Optional to deal with the absence of a value; as a result, you protect your code against unintended null pointer exceptions.
Optional is one of the many exciting features introduced in Java 8. Check out the Optional Java Challenge and try to solve it as well!
See Also. What is Optional ?

Without Optional, when a method signature has return type of certain object.The user often tend to assert the existence of the object. Java 8 introduced an Optional class which is a nicer way to avoid NullPointerExceptions.You can use Optional to encapsulate the potential null values and pass or return it safely without worrying about the exception..

NullPointerExceptions are Runtime Exceptions which are thrown by the jvm at runtime. Get the code of the Java … The purpose of Optional is not to replace every single null reference in your code base but rather to help you design better APIs in which, just by reading the signature of a method, users can tell whether to expect an optional value and deal with it appropriately. Rajeev Singh • Java • Jun 15, 2017 • 7 mins read If you’re a Java programmer, then you must have heard about or experienced NullPointerExceptions in your programs. Special thanks to Rodrigo, Scott, and Padhu for trying out the Java Challenge!

Chapter 9, "Optional: a better alternative to null," from Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-style Programming "Monadic Java" by Mario Fusco

Java Optional Tutorial with Examples.

Jun 19, 2016 • Mario Pio Gioiosa.

Null checks in programs are often overlooked by developers causing serious bugs in code. Item 5: When No Value Is Present, Throw a java.util.NoSuchElementException Exception Via orElseThrow() Since Java 10 Using the Optional.orElseThrow() method … Java 8 Optional - Replace your get() calls. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available. Anyone programming in Java is surely aware of the pain of the never-ending null checks and the infamous NullPointerException… How to Throw Exceptions. The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. In this article, we learned that how you can adopt the new Java SE 8 java.util.Optional. In this article, we look at how, when, and where to best apply Optionals.