Java 8 Coming Soon

For those who have missed to track the recent Java news, we are sharing the latest update about Java 8 - to be released in September 2013. This particular edition of Java is said to have groundbreaking functions which would turn out to be a significant move in the Java history.

Taking a flashback of previous versions – Java 1.1 had introduced ‘inner classes, java beans’ while 1.3 comprised ‘java sound, jar indexing’ and 1.4 featured ‘assertions, xml processing, logging api,. There were no subsequent releases. The language remained same, only the Java libraries grew by leaps and bounds until Java 5. With Java 5, the market saw a huge enhancements in features which constituted enumerations, annotations, generics, varargs, autoboxing etc. while Java 6 came in with a scripting language support, integrated web services,  java compiler api and more, on the other hand Java 7 which was released in July 2011 saw few language changes, diamond syntax, resource management, numeric literals, etc.

According to JSR 337, with Java 8, the market will see a great change just like Java 5. Not because of the new features but because Java 8 will be introducing Lambdas – an anonymous function literals which will change the ways of expressing concepts in Java. Besides, Java 8 will be laced with following features:

• Compact Profiles – These will define subset profiles of Java Java SE Platform Specification so that applications that do not require the entire Platform can be deployed and run on small devices.
• Annotations on Java Types – To extend the set of annotable locations in the syntax of the Java programming language
• DocTree API- This will extend the compiler Tree API to provide structured access to the content of javadoc comments  
• Enhanced Core Libraries – To improve the usability and convenience of the library using new Lambda language
• Bulk Data Operations for Collections – To add functionality to the Java Collections Framework for bulk operations upon data. This is commonly referenced as “filter/map/reduce for Java”.
• Base64 Encoding and Decoding - These will define a standard API for Base64 encoding and decoding
• Secure Random Number Generation - To operate within specified quality and responsiveness constraints.

Over and above these features, Java 8 will be containing some features which were meant for Java 7 but were omitted from the release.

Let’s look forward and keep the enthusiasm live to see the new and better Java 8 and how it revolutionizes the Java programming.