By the way… Java 8 is out

Last month Java 8 was released! The previous version was released in 2011 and Java 6 in 2006. This version was expected for a long time but to me it did not generate a lot of buzz. I definitely heard more about the Google Cloud and Amazon EC2 price drops in the same week and now the Internet is all about heartbleed. The new features Java 8 have been discussed for a while now and few interesting ones (JDK modularity) have been dropped along the way sadly. It probably gave Java 8 a look of failed soufflé.

Nevertheless Java 8 introduces lambdas! A long time awaited feature, especially with the popularity of functional programming nowadays. Lambdas do not come along as there are now default methods in interfaces and the Stream API to process collections in parallel. You can find the full list of the new features on Oracle web site.

Now what does it mean for ProActive? Well, we are still supporting Java 6 as it often installed on our customer’s sites. We mostly develop using Java 7 runtime but do not code with Java 6 features to keep the compatibility. Given that Java 8 is now available for downloads, we will also start using it as a runtime and add it as part of our automated testing jobs on Jenkins. That being said we will still have to wait to use Java 8 features in the code and will probably jump from Java 6 to Java 8 once it is mainstream. As one of ProActive use case is to build desktop grids we often don’t control the Java runtime installed on these machines. If we were developing a server side software I would advocate to switch to Java 8 after some period of testing.

Originally I planned to write one blog post explaining how Java 8 would impact ProActive but as I tried to use it I found some issues along the way. Actually some issues have quite an impact for us and we should probably have started testing it months ago. Upcoming blog posts will detail the problems we faced and how we solved them.

If you are already using Java 8 as your runtime, you will have to add the JVM option “-noverify” to the native scripts we provided in order to start the Scheduler and the nodes. And do not expect the Javascript integration (for tasks and pre/post/selection scripts) to work properly, more details to come.