Up until then, Java’s built-in Http support was rather low-level, and you had to fall back on using third-party libraries like Apache HttpClient or OkHttp (which are great libraries, btw!). Without this file your code still compiles, it just gets placed into the unnamed module. (In case you are wondering, GUI installers like the one from Oracle or AdoptOpenJDK will do the unzipping and modifying the PATH variable for you, that’s about it.). If you want to learn more about a specific version, go to the AdoptOpenJDKsite, choose the latest Java version, download, and install it. Multi-Release .jar files made it possible to have one .jar file which contains different classes for different JVM versions. Reply. With the switch to time-based releases with Java 9 the naming scheme also changed, and Java versions aren’t prefixed with 1.x anymore. The same goes for all other Java versions in between. Switch expressions simplify coding by extending switch so that it can be used as either a statement … This leads to two different Java distributions, which can be very confusing at first. OpenJDK builds by Oracle(!). It is not in the scope of this guide to go into full detail on Jigsaw, but have a look at the previous links to learn more. Granted, the details of Java 8 vs. Java 9 may not be of huge interest to the business looking for the best software solutions to meet its needs. Java 8 Tips. To oversimplify it boils down to you having different support options/maintenance guarantees. First and foremost, what new features have been added in the 4 and a half years between the two versions? We just migrated an application from Java 5 to 7, but too many components break with Java 8 and it will be years before there is a priority to upgrade the rest of the system. There’s the special field of Android development, where the Java version is basically stuck at Java 7, with a specific set of Java 8 features available. This is usually done by applications and libraries that want to inject classes into the classpath at runtime. The HttpClient from Java 9 in its final, non-preview version. Rather, you’ll get a good foundation in all language features up until Java 8. Factory Pattern Using Java 8 Lambda Expressions. The Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) Garbage Collector has been removed, and the experimental Z Garbage Collector collector has been added. For information about the new features, changes, and notable bug fixes included in the JDK 14.0.1, 11.0.7 (Long Term Support), 8u251, and 7u261 update releases, see the following release notes: 1. Ignore the Java-Docker images, .msi wrappers or platform-specific packages for the moment. Oracle announced to open JavaEE – what to expect in the future? JEP-355 Text Blocks (Preview) This JEP introduces a multi-line string literal, a text block, finally. ChaCha20 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphers are available. Simply leave a comment down below. This site uses cookies to improve your experience. There are major enhancement made in Java5, Java6, Java7 and Java8 like auto-boxing, generics, var-args, java annotations, enum, premain method, lambda expressions, functional interface, method references etc. Which in turns means that all language features from Java 8 serve as very good Java base knowledge and everything else (Java 9-14) is pretty much additional features on top of that baseline. In Java 8, you can cast the system class loader to a URLClassLoader. It is still strongly typed, though, and only applies to variables inside methods (thanks, dpash, for pointing that out again).