Friday, September 13, 2013

Pre-JavaOne JDK 8 News

With JavaOne 2013 less than two weeks away, it's not surprising that there have been some announcements in recent days regarding JDK 8. In this post, I briefly look at these JDK 8 announcements.

In his blog There’s not a moment to lose!, Oracle's Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group Mark Reinhold recently posted about the JDK 8 Developer Preview. According to Reinhold, the Developer Preview milestone "is intended for broad testing by developers." Reinhold then goes on to highlight that "the principal feature of this release is Project Lambda (JSR 335)" and he describes in one paragraph the impact of lambda expressions on the language. Reinhold specifically mentions some of the "many other new features" of JDK 8 such as the new Date/Time API, Nashorn JavaScript engine, and the removal of HotSpot JVM permanent generation.

On the same day that Reinhold posted "JDK 8 Developer Preview" on his blog (9 September 2013), The Java Tutorials' Weblog featured a new post called "JDK 8 Documentation - Developer Preview Release" and the post "Java Tutorial JDK 8 Early Access Updates" appeared on the same weblog the next day. The latter post states that "new JDK 8 early access documentation" was included with the "updated Java Tutorial" that was part of the "release of JDK 7u40." The post summarizes two major additions to the tutorials: new Data-Time API Trail and bulk data operations lesson.

The JDK 8 Documentation - Developer Preview Release post highlights the "Java Development Kit Release 8 (JDK 8) Early Access Documentation," which it describes as consisting of Developer Guides, The Java Tutorials, and API documentation. Several categories of JDK 8 documentation are described with links to the described documentation: language and library enhancements, security enhancements, tool enhancements, internationalization enhancements, platform and system enhancements, removed features, and more documentation to expect.

Besides the JDK 8 news mentioned in this post, other pre-JavaOne news in recent days has included mention in Java Mission Control (Finally) Released! of Java Mission Control being converged into HotSpot JVM from JRockit as of Java 7u40 (part of Oracle Java SE Advanced). The post Using the Java Discovery Protocol was posted today. It is important to note that, as the Java 7 Update 40 Release Notes state, although "JDK 7u40 includes the first release of Java Mission Control (JMC) that is bundled with the Hotspot JVM," "Java Mission Control (JMC) is a commercial feature available for java users with a commercial License." This is in line with what was discussed at JavaOne 2012.

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