As Oracle continues to improve the Java Development Kit, the company has stated that it will not be pushing back the release of Java SE 8. The update is still on schedule for its March 18 release date. The final Java 8 release candidate should be available starting on January 23.
Despite Oracle crunching to get Java 8 in shape for the scheduled deadline, the update will still ship with known bugs that coders will not be able to fix before launch. The company is referring to them as non-showstopper bugs and says that it will be delaying fixes on them to ensure Java 8 hits its March release deadline.
Java 8 was originally scheduled to launch during September 2013, but was delayed due to the numerous java security vulnerabilities uncovered over the past year. Oracle has since stated that it is in the process of fixing decade-old security problems introduced into Java before the company even purchased Sun Microsystems.
Java 8 will bring numerous features to Java, many of which were originally scheduled to be implemented in Java 7. The largest change will be support for closures (lambda expressions) under “Project Lambda.” Other changes include “Project Coin” implementation that did not make it into Java 7, annotations on Java Types, and a Date and Time API. “Project Nashorn” will also be coming with Java 8, though “Project Jigsaw” has been delayed to Java 9, meaning that modularization will not be coming to have until the scheduled Java SE 9 release in 2016.
via Java World
