Java Standard Edition 8 (Java SE 8) isn't due until March,
but Oracle has just released a preview build for testing by developers. The
Developer Preview for JDK (Java Development Kit) 8, known as Milestone 8, was
made available on Monday.
The key feature of this release is Project Lambda (JSR-335), which adds closures and related features to the Java language to support programming in multicore environments. Project Lambda comprises lambda expressions, default methods, and method references to the Java programming language, and it extends the libraries to support parallelizable operations upon streamed data.
Project Lambda was one of the biggest features to slip past the
Milestone 6 release in January, because of Oracle's focus on the Java-based
browser security vulnerabilities that have grabbed headlines over the past two
years.
In addition to Project Lambda, Milestone 8 comes with a
number of new features, including the new Date and Time API (JSR 310); Compact
Profiles, which defines some subset Profiles of the Java SE platform to run on
small devices; the Nashorn JavaScript Engine (JSR-223), which aims to allow
Java developers to embed JavaScript in Java applications. Reinhold, Chief
Architect of the Java Platform also noted the removal of Permanent Generation
from the HotSpot virtual machine.
Reinhold says developers have till the end of October to
report bugs and problems, saying:
“After that we’ll gradually ramp down the rate of change in
order to stabilize the code, so bugs reported later on might not get fixed in
time for the GA release.”
