A majority of Java developers are planning to migrate to the upcoming release of Java 8. A recent survey conducted by Typesafe, a middleware vendor, revealed that 67% of its respondents plan to upgrade to Java 8, with more than half planning to make the switch within 12 months and about 29% planning to upgrade during the first six months.
Java SE 8 is expected to be released on March 18.
According to the Typesafe survey, 59% of respondents believe that Oracle has done a good job getting Java security back on track.
(Related: What Java SE 8 and Open JDK 8 will have on release)
One Java 8 feature that has developers excited is the addition of lambda expressions. Eighty-three percent of respondents stated it as their favorite upcoming addition, with improvements to the core libraries with lambdas as their second favorite. The support of lambda expressions is the biggest functionality addition to Java since Generics in Java SE 5.
The survey also found that 73% of respondents are using Java 7, with 22% using version 6. Forty-four percent of developers working with Java 6 plan to upgrade directly to Java 8.
Other important findings included that one in six survey participants plan to only deploy the Java Runtime Environment for Java 8, meaning “they plan to run Java code compiled with earlier versions of Java on the new JVM, but not recompile that code or create new code with the Java 8 JDK,” according to the report. Ninety-eight percent use Oracle’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM), 88% use Oracle’s Java SDK, and 36% use OpenJDK.
Typesafe surveyed 2,870 Java developers worldwide. The full report is available here.
