With continuous developments and upgrades, Oracle has launched the most awaited release of the new version – Java 8 with the new development kit for it. This latest version from the company is comprised of several inciting features that are available on both the language as well as the JVM level. In fact, many experts believe that these new features have exceeded their expectations. Although a number of features have been put on hold to be released in the next version, a huge range of others is made available with this release. Numerous new methods have been provided for the creation of a perspective functional paradigm that will replace the old one, providing developers with comfortable solutions to their problems. This is one solution that has been much sought after as many developers have been waiting for it for a while now. With this update, bugs can be tracked easily as well as fixed in a handy manner, where decomposition of all the problems in a functional value contributes to the purpose. Also, a number of tools have been developed and added to the new version that can be used for the management of binaries through this language.
New Features Available
The release of Java 8 is accompanied with a number of new and improved features of the programming language, which will make the development process easier and faster for both expert as well as novice developers.
- Lambda expressions: Java 8 comes with the Lambda expression support, which takes this language to the functional programming front along with other languages based on the JVM like Clojure and Scala. This is one among the major additions made to the language in the last decade, where the syntax relates especially to the collection and array operations with a tighter integration of Lambdas into the libraries of the core language.
- Parallel operations: With the introduction of Lambda operators, a key concept of parallel operations has been introduced, where actual repetitions will be carried by the core library instead of an iterator. With this, parallel operations can now be carried over by the framework on long arrays like mapping, filtering and sorting.
- Interoperability of Java and JavaScript: With Java 8, the new Nashorn JavaScript engine is introduced to bridge the ever-increasing gap between JavaScript and Java by providing the speed of JVM-level to its execution using new features like invokeDynamic introduced in Java 7. Thus, the use of the JVM, instead of node js instance, for integration of JS with the backend allows for a seamless interoperability between in-process code of JavaScript and Java.
- New APIs for date and time: Since, Joda time has provided the date/time API support for Java developers till now, it couldn’t be adopted as the native framework due to its design flaw. Java 8 is provided with a fresh date/time API that has been built from the scratch, which is designed to provide clear operations and simple use, operating on values manipulated in both machine time and human readable formats.
- Concurrent Accumulators: In concurrent programming, the common scenario is to update the numeric counters, for which, methods available till now need a higher familiarity and are relied on CAS instructions of the processor directly. Java 8 provides a solution to this setback at the level of framework with new classes for concurrent accumulator, enabling you to increment/decrement the counter value efficiently in a thread-safe manner.
Thus, with these features and several features provided with the release of Java 8 version, developers can enjoy several benefits of installing this new version. For those developers who look forward to newer options with technologies, Java 8 provides them the right mix of reliability and innovation in the offered features.
Added Security
Initially this release was scheduled to be in September 2013, but the detection of security problems caused a delay to the launch. These flaws were fixed before the final release, resulting in a perfect modularity that the Jigsaw project provided. Thus, this edition of Java 8 released is provided with a high level of security alongside the ease of development of long codes and several advanced features for Java developers.