Oracle announces Java 8 developer preview for testing

BANGALORE, INDIA: Oracle has announced the first developer preview of Java development kit version 8 a.k.a Milestone 8, for multiple platforms including Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris.

"The JDK 8 Developer Preview (a.k.a. Milestone 8) builds are now available!," said a blog post by Java platform chief architect Mark Reinhold.

This milestone is intended for broad testing by developers, said Reinhold and further added, "We've run all tests on all Oracle-supported platforms and haven't found any glaring issues. We've also fixed many of the bugs discovered since we reached the Feature Complete milestone back in June."

Another announcement from Reinhold also include on JSR 335 (Lambda Expressions for the Java Programming Language) which aims to support programming in a multicore environment by adding closures and related features to the Java language.

"The principal feature of this release is Project Lambda (JSR 335), which aims to make it easier to write code for multicore processors," said Reinhold.

"It adds lambda expressions, default methods, and method references to the Java programming language, and extends the libraries to support parallelizable operations upon streamed data," added Reinhold.

Some of the new features also includes new Date and Time API (JSR 310), Compact Profiles, the Nashorn JavaScript Engine, and even some anti-features such as the removal of the Permanent Generation from the HotSpot virtual machine.

However, a warning on the website said, "These early access release downloads of the JRE and JDK are based on code available on OpenJDK at the time they were built and might not include the latest security patches."