UPDATED 15:33 EDT / MARCH 13 2014

Oracle bets big on Java SE 8 with Project Lambda

java logoJava has had plenty of bad press in recent years because of security issues. The upcoming release of Java has already been delayed, which was schedule to release September last year. But Java developers are still looking forward for the next major Java 8 release.

The first release candidates of Java 8, b128 and Java 8 RC2 showed up on February, fixing some serious flaw issues. Oracle was determined that Java 8 would not suffer further slippage. In a post on the Java Source, Tori Wieldt of Oracle’s Java team said that Java SE 8 will see its General Availability release next Monday, March 18.

The Java SE Development Kit (JDK) is a package consisting of compilers and debuggers to develop of cross-platform Java applications. The Java SE Runtime Environment, widely used by developers, is part of the JD kit.

The reason behind March release is due to fix security issues, and also to work on two ambitious features Project Lambda and Project Jigsaw, both originally been billed part of Java SE 7. JDK 8 release manager Mathias Axelsson told that only showstoppers (P1) are being considered for fixing in the initial JDK 8 release. Non-showstopper bugs will be deferred to a later release in order to ensure we keep to the JDK 8 schedule and can ship on March 18.

Project Lambda and Project Jigsaw

The big language features for Java SE 8 are lambda expressions (closures) and default methods (formerly called defender methods or virtual extension methods).  Adding lambda expressions to the language opens up a host of new expressive opportunities for applications and libraries.  You might assume that lambda expressions are simply a more syntactically compact form of inner classes, but, in fact, the implementation of lambda expressions is substantially different.

Project Lambda will boost programming on multicore processors by adding closures and related features. Lambda bring functional programming, a specialty of Scala, to Java 8. In the Java Source blog, Wieldt said that the need to get Project Lambda into this version was an important goal that has now been met. Project Lambda adds support for lambda expressions and virtual extension methods, opening up possibilities for improved multicore support by enabling internal iteration idioms.

Project Jigsaw, which was slated to release along with Java 8 is slated for Java 9. The goal of this Project is to design and implement a standard module system for the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the platform itself and to the JDK. The resulting module system to be useful to developers for their own code. Jigsaw was originally intended for Java 7 but was deferred to Java 8 as part of “Plan B”. More recently a decision was made to defer it to Java 9 in order to allow more time both for development and for broad review, testing, and feedback.

The source code of lambda is available at http://hg.openjdk.java.net/lambda/lambda and early-access download for Jigsaw is at http://jdk8.java.net/jigsaw/.

java-project-lamda-screenshot

Screenshot from the Java Community Process for lambda expression Java Specification Requests

New atomic number and stripped implementations

Apart from Java 8’s Lambdas and new Date and Time API, the atomic number implementations are very important. Java 8’s atomic number implementations are quite faster. The atomic Number implementations will provide superior performance to work on multiple threads.

Stripped implementations was a proposed feature for Java 8 that allows customized implementations of Java SE to be packaged with applications that run on it. Mark Reinhold has proposed that Stripped Implementations could be dropped from Java SE 8. The stripped Implementations feature of Java SE 8 requires some nontrivial changes to the TCK license that will take a lot of time. The stripped implementation is important to the future of the Java platform, and that’s why it will be added in a release prior to Java SE 9.

Nashorn JavaScript engine

Oracle wants to leverage JavaScript because it is suitable for different types of applications and is in the best interest of the JVM to support multiple languages. For that reason, Oracle started Project Nashorn last year to focus on developing a JavaScript engine for the company’s JVM that is intended to leverage JVM libraries and offer higher performance.

Oracle’s new 100% ECMA262-compliant JavaScript engine is the latest effort to open up the JVM to languages other than Java and attract more developers. Nashorn is built on top of Java and takes advantage of standard Java security measures. Nashorn uses Java’s InvokeDynamic capabilities for method invocation and is roughly 3-5 times faster than Rhino, which is the current JavaScript engine. It properly selects the most suitable target at runtime on a per-invocation basis. This means that you should never have to worry about overloaded methods when dealing with Java APIs.

Oracle’s Java Development Kit is still the dominant choice for most developers in building scalable applications. With Java 8, Oracle and the Java community want to deliver features and enhancements to the Java platform that provide advanced monitoring and analysis of Java application data, which will help enterprise customers more rapidly analyze, understand and resolve issues; greater security and control over end user Java environments for system administrators; increased efficiency and responsiveness of Java applications.


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