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Java 8 Officially Released
darthcamaro writes "Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features, including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8, however, is still missing at least one critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years. 'It's a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java,' James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. 'In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go.'"
Probably the most important question in the mind of the general public.
Crap, I already have a hard enough time getting non-programmers to understand that Java and JavaScript aren't the same thing.
And another round of everyone getting ask.com toolbars.
Boooo.
Yeah, that actually sucks some serious monkey balls right there. It doesn't make any sense at all for Oracle to do such a thing with something as important as the Java platform.
There has been a petition to remove this "feature" for some time now, but despite the millions of Java developers, it never took off.
Yeah, go for it.
It's rare to see stuff break recently between even major versions of java (with some notable exceptions). Usually when it does, it's the result of people (inevitably the makers of 3rd party libraries you are forced to use) doing stupid shit (often times using stuff that's been deprecated since like java 3).
What the fuck are you going on about? Java 8 supports all the previous versions without a problem. Same for Java 7, and all the others before it. If you write code that breaks because of backwards compatibility issues, you're a retard.
No, they most definitely do NOT. We inherited an infrastructure (from a company we bought) that relies heavily on Java 1.4.2 and Java 1.5 (both on the server end and on the client end). Many of the (entirely internal) apps and servlets will not run in Java 6, much less Java 7. Believe me, we've tried. Too much deprecated stuff (not to mention security keys from Sun that haven't been changed in over half a decade).
We've got a two year long project going on to upgrade everything - but because so many libraries are shared (including *SUN* libraries that don't work in Java 6/7) across hundreds of projects, it's going to be an upgrade nightmare. In total, we have GIGABYTES of code, spread across a pretty large infrastructure (comprised of over a hundred servers and 5 racks of SAN).
Of course, our plans are to ensure that all code is up to snuff so we never run into this again - but we had no choice in this matter, since we neither wrote nor planned the original code bases. But what WE do going forward doesn't resolve what we have to do in order to move forward.
Perhaps you simply haven't done any real Java coding on an Enterprise level? If you had, you'd never had made such a post.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Meanwhile in the real world:
-people use methods that have been deprecated since java3 (including 3'rd party vendors that you have to deal with)
-massive (and expensive) libraries are used years after they stopped being maintained/supported
-new versions do break old functionality by adding new behavior (often around security)
-reasonable mistakes/oversights where new situations are introduced and not accounted for in code (statuses are reported differently / new things added to enums / etc)
-new versions do break old functionality by adding new behavior (often around security)
Multiple programs each requiring unique versions of Java (and each only looking at the default Java on the system) coexisting on the same machine used to be my biggest nightmare.
Now though, it's security. Oh, I'm sorry. Did the vendor sign their .jar files in a way that makes 7_fourtywhatever not shit out dialog boxes? Oh they didn't? Did Sun include simple registry values to fix this? No. They moved to a crazy collection of files in %appdata%? Oh, that should be fun.
Do you want to run this code?
Are you absolutely sure you want to run this code?
No, you can't run it anyway, because your security settings are wrong.
Would you like to change your settings now?
No, you can't. You need to change obscure settings.
Fuck you, Sun. Right in the goat ass.
Far BETTER would be if Java could be aware of how much ram the computer has, and enlarge its heaps as necessary & possible. Few things piss me off more than getting OutOfMemoryException on a computer with 16 gigs because I forgot to manually specify a larger heap size when I launched some executable jarfile from the commandline.
I mean, seriously. Would it really be *that* hard for the JVM to handle TWO sets of memory pools instead of just one, so that if the Eden space (for example) gets exhausted and is due for GC, the JVM would check with Windows to see how much physical RAM is free, and if there's a lot of it, just allocate a new chunk that's roughly double the size of the old one, start sticking new data into the new one immediately, and consolidate data from the old one into the new one as a very, very low-priority non-blocking background thread that eventually returns the first chunk of RAM to Windows once everything in it has been either moved or freed. For longer-lived services where memory leaks are a real issue, you could tell it, "expand by doubling up to [max megs or percent free], then fall back to conventional garbage collection -- possibly, grabbing a new chunk of ram that's the same size as the old one if possible so the time-consuming object-copy can be deferred and done in the background"