No Null Checks: Use Optional and supplier functions

I need to call a getter on an instance that might be null.
Use Optional and supplier functions to navigate an object chain that may contain nulls.

Here I am trying to return the Street portion of an Employee's address.  If anything is missing I will use an empty string as the Street name.  But I need to check for nulls at every turn.  This results in a nasty triple nested null check.

This is a common pattern, other languages have a null safe getter construct that can be used.  Groovy has the elvis operator - ?. that will simply return a null.

With Java 8 you can use the Optional class with the map method to navigate the object chain.

Simply chaining these map calls together and using the method literal you can safely navigate this object chain. The revised method is significantly less complicated - which is a good thing.