Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JDK 8 Release Notes

oracle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 314 posts

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#91

Post by ivanr »

For me, the best part of this release is the fact that the TLS stack has been significantly improved, and is now quite good. The lack of some critical features in Java 7 (e.g., inability to enforce cipher suite order) made TLS effectively unusable.

The list of improvements is quite long, actually:

- Server Cipher Suite Preference

- Strong Server Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman Parameters

- Authenticated (GCM) Suites

- Hardware Acceleration on Intel and AMD processors

- Server-Side SNI Support

- Ability to disable client-initiated renegotiation

- TLS 1.2 enabled by default in client mode

- Clients support Ephemeral DH over 1024 bits

More details here: http://blog.ivanristic.com/2014/03/ssl-tls-improvements-in-j...

And there are more security improvements documented here: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/features#core/sec

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#92

Post by ephemeralgomi »

mbillie1 wrote: post #71
bane wrote: post #4

You know, I've been messing around with Java little lately. Nothing too fancy. It's actually not a bad language -- with a modern IDE it's actually pretty quick and breezy to work with. If the standard library was cleaned up and the warts were all removed and filled in, even if it broke compatibility (call it Java X or the Latte language or something) I'd be okay with that. There's too much old 90's cruft hanging arou…

This sort of reaction is surprising to me. Java has been a useable, performant language for some time now. The tooling is excellent, the JVM is astonishingly good, and it will run circles around Python, no less Perl. I don't think many of the arguments against Java are based on how it works once you've written it, but rather to the horrendous verbosity, class-explosion-as-a-design-pattern, painfulness to read (not de…

> painfulness to read (not debug with an IDE, which is easy, but to actually read Java code)

This is incredibly important and I never see any Java advocate addressing it. I _do_ see tons of people pointing out how easy it is to automate refactoring, and then they leave dozens of ugly, poorly-thought-out methods lying around...

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#93

Post by cia_plant »

bane wrote: post #4

You know, I've been messing around with Java little lately. Nothing too fancy. It's actually not a bad language -- with a modern IDE it's actually pretty quick and breezy to work with. If the standard library was cleaned up and the warts were all removed and filled in, even if it broke compatibility (call it Java X or the Latte language or something) I'd be okay with that. There's too much old 90's cruft hanging arou…

No, actually, Java is a really bad language.

It has a very complicated type system, but doesn't even allow you to express things like function composition or generic sums at the language level.

Its syntax is stunningly verbose (e.g., no map literals; only now adding lambda literals; no type synonyms; no operator overloading).

There is no macro system or method_missing or any other way of really extending the language, except the ugly, unsafe reflection system ... so now all the libraries (Spring, Hibernate, etc.), use annotations and reflection to modify object behavior at runtime.

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#94

Post by jrabone »

brown9-2 wrote: post #84
jrabone wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because God knows, Java needs another logging framework. Seriously does ANYONE get any additional value out of the morass of crappy logging systems out there over and above System.out.println? Log4J is PARTICULARLY brain-damaged, with its refrain of "ooh, someone put a log4j.xml in their JAR (one of hundreds), that beats your log4j.properties.". Or SL4Js amazing performance of "1.6 doesn't work with Scala because of…

logback is pretty great. I can't take anyone seriously that defers all logging to System.out.println - do you really want the inability to change logging levels between live, test, etc?

Hmm. I've used that feature about once in 20 years of coding professionally.

My production systems don't generally log; they're busy serving (I once worked on a hard real-time embedded air traffic control system where production logging was literally a single bit of information - a logic level that went high when the processor was busy, and low on idle - so we could measure our timing safety margin with an oscilloscope)

Test systems log at debug except for low level packages that insist on ridiculous logging (Hibernate, http client - and both of those have ANOTHER level of hacks to do wire-level logging in addition to the standard stuff).

Logging is just so painful, and not just in Java. Debian switched to rsyslog some time ago and I am still seeing no benefit at all, yet have to learn yet another half-arsed buggy scripting language to achieve simple things like, oh, not having my DHCPD logs showing up in three different files. FFS people.

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#95

Post by maaaats »

suyash wrote: post #68
maaaats wrote: post #21

IntelliJ just pinged me with an update, and checking the release notes it says "ships final support for java 8". Sweet!

A better light weight alternate is Netbeans 8 that also just got released and has full Java 8 support in addition to many many other features: https://netbeans.org/community/releases/80/

I'm not sure why you felt the need to add "a better light weight", why not just say "Netbeans also got Java 8 support"? This isn't the place to start a flamewar.

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#96

Post by matwood »

jrabone wrote: post #56
nicobn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to reply with exactly the same thing, and I'd add slf4j.

Because God knows, Java needs another logging framework. Seriously does ANYONE get any additional value out of the morass of crappy logging systems out there over and above System.out.println? Log4J is PARTICULARLY brain-damaged, with its refrain of "ooh, someone put a log4j.xml in their JAR (one of hundreds), that beats your log4j.properties.". Or SL4Js amazing performance of "1.6 doesn't work with Scala because of…

Well said. Logging in java is a complete mess. Logging should be easy, yet it can suck days of your time to get all the various loggers, facades, and libraries to play nice together.

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#97

Post by stusmall »

cia_plant wrote: post #93
bane wrote: post #4

You know, I've been messing around with Java little lately. Nothing too fancy. It's actually not a bad language -- with a modern IDE it's actually pretty quick and breezy to work with. If the standard library was cleaned up and the warts were all removed and filled in, even if it broke compatibility (call it Java X or the Latte language or something) I'd be okay with that. There's too much old 90's cruft hanging arou…

No, actually, Java is a really bad language. It has a very complicated type system, but doesn't even allow you to express things like function composition or generic sums at the language level. Its syntax is stunningly verbose (e.g., no map literals; only now adding lambda literals; no type synonyms; no operator overloading). There is no macro system or method_missing or any other way of really extending the language…

What is complex about the type system?

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#98

Post by camus2 »

suyash wrote: post #66
hansjorg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nashorn is said to be high-performance, and I've looked around for benchmarks several times since it was announced, but I still can't find anything but this: https://github.com/tadas-subonis/java-nashorn-performance-sa... What gives? Wouldn't a real comparison to Rhino and V8 (at least) be interesting? Edit: strike that. Found someone who ran Octane and SunSpider and compared it to V8 and Spidermonkey: http://wnamele…

Nashorn is going to get faster with time. It is not a browser engine so don't try to compare it directly with V8 etc.

> Nashorn is going to get faster with time. It is not a browser engine so don't try to compare it directly with V8 etc.

v8 is not a browser engine either ,it's a javascript engine,just like Rhino. you are mixing up Webkit with v8.

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#99

Post by Yhippa »

neverminder wrote: post #70
hkphooey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is best practice when it comes to Java GUIs? Would you recommend Java for building cross-platform desktop apps with near native UI performance? The IntelliJ IDE looks great but most Java desktop apps I've come across just look and feel weird. Not sure why there is such a big difference.

JavaFX is now a default platform (supported by Oracle) for developing desktop apps. It replaced the clumsy Swing and is showing a lot of promise. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/javaf...

What is the case for desktop apps these days vs web apps? I would love to mess around with JavaFX but really can't come up with a compelling reason to use it.

Re: JDK 8 Release Notes

#100

Post by lvh »

I'm very happy with the JVM in general, but I really, really, really wish they fixed the start up time. People compile Clojure down to Javascript for command line tools precisely because of this. lein takes annoyingly long, so I don't do it.

I realize this is not a real concern for them for e.g. servers, but I wish they had some developer- or desktop-specific configuration that would start about as fast as a Python VM. I don't even care if it runs code (a reasonable fraction) slower.

Post reply on HN