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We are pleased to announce that Liferay 7.0 will be moving to Java 8 dropping support for all previous versions of Java which are no longer supported by Oracle. The Liferay community can now enjoy the full benefits of Java 8 and all the libraries and tools that have moved to Java 8. You will also of course be able to make contributions to Liferay Portal using Java 8 in the near future.

What other benefits might you expect to see...

• You will never see another java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
• You will see us leveraging all the JDK 8 goodies in the near future. I expect our developers to take advantage of streams and lambdas right away. Functional/default interfaces and accumulators look like they will have some interesting use cases. Finally, I definitely would like us to take advantage of the new java.time package.
• You will also see our developer tools moving to JDK 8. Liferay IDE and Developer Studio in particular will now be able to move to Eclipse Neon.

Some of you may be wondering why it took so long. Liferay 7.0 has been in development for over two years now and we are on the verge of our RC release. The answer is that we wanted to ensure all of our users had an upgrade path for their application server. Moving to Java 8 had been on our wish list since Oracle ended of support for Java 7 in April 2015, but unfortunately the app servers that we wanted to support wasn’t quite ready. We were prepared to support to stay on Java 7 if required because we were not willing to abandon any of our users. Fortunately, this is no longer an issue and we can all enjoy Liferay 7.0 and Java 8 together.

If you are not familiar with Java 8 yet, we recommend that you take a look at the "What’s new in JDK 8?" article from Oracle.

Update: You may have issues using Java 8 features with Spring 3.2.x that involves ASM/AspectJ as Java 8 support has only been added as best-effort support. We have upgraded our spring core to 4.1.9 so that we are fully compliant with Java 8.