Java 8 features key to adoption
A new report by Typesafe indicates two thirds of developers plan on adopting Java 8 within the next year, with most of them aiming to adopt within 6 months.
New versions of Java have always been slow to gain adoption among both developers and to a larger extent, the public. This has often led to frustrations with regards to deploying projects on outdated versions of java. Every few versions of Java always seems to have such great features that people can’t resist fast tracking their upgrade path. The last time such features were introduced was probably Java 5 with generics and to a lesser degree annotations.
One such feature of Java 8 is lambda expressions which provide more than just syntactic sugar for closures. It provides somewhat automatic support for concurrent execution which in the days of Moore’s Law reaching its limits will be a boon for developers looking to multi-threaded programming for performance improvements.
While developer adoption of Java 8 will lead to more Java 8 deployments at the server level, one can also hope that this adoption might also leak out among the general public. Java 8 also has a rebooting of JavaFX and more installations out there might make Java FX more attractive on the desktop if more people are likely to be running a java installation that supports it.
Either way, its exciting times ahead for Java!