Great joy in the world - Java 8 released

Originally published March 18, 2014

I have been using pre-release versions of Java 8 for a long time but it is great to have an official release. You can get it here.

I have found that lambdas and streams have been very useful features.

Many people, myself included, worried about the future of Java when Oracle bought the bones of Sun Microsystems. I must say now that I think Oracle has been doing a good job supporting Java.

I would like to convert most of my open source Java projects to Java 8, taking advantage of new features as appropriate. The problem is that I hate to break backwards compatibility for people who aren't going to update soon. I probably should not update the code examples for my Java books either.