In a series of posts published under the title 'Higher-Order Java Parallelism'. Part 4 -- the last in the series -- walks you through a fully 'functional programming' Java example using Java's functional library, as well as, explaining the concept of a Monad and one of the main features offered in Java 5's concurrency API. Read the complete post 'Higher-Order Java Parallelism, Part 4: A Better Future': http://apocalisp.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/a-better-future/