Plans to move Cobalt over to Java 8?

Andrew Gerber

Hello,

Java 8 introduces many powerful new features to the Java language. I'm wondering, what is the plan/timeframe of migrating modules and environments to Java 8? Thanks!

Ulrich Karsten

Hi Andrew, in the CIPA projects (custom IP applications) we have evaluated Java 8 and have moved the first application to that version. As it turns out, Java 8 is not that fully backward compatible as earlier versions were. Oracle took the liberty to clean up with some undocumented behaviour and changed the implementation of especially the Collections framework in such a way that code that relies on undocumented behaviour may break. E.g. we had to fix a third-party library (open source) that relied on the ordering of members of a HashMap, iterating over it, and we encountered problems with another library that made use of com.sun.* classes. I debugged into the JDK code to understand some of the problems we experienced and got the impression that the Collections code has become much more complex in the new version. The alleged optimizations seem to have bloated the code quite a bit. If this were code I had to maintain, I'd say there's room for refactoring for maintainability, now For more information, see, e.g. here:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8-compatibility-guide-2156366.html
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8-whats-new-2157071.html
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8-known-issues-2157115.html