Although it’s only been days since the official release of Java 7 and Oracle is still working to clean up bugs in that release, some members of the Java Community Process (JCP) are already turning their attention to Java 8. “Java 8 is supposed to set the scene for the cloud, for a wider deployment arena,” said RedHat’s Mark Little. “Modularity and true multitenancy within the JVM will be critical for 8 if Java will be dominant in the cloud.”
Another feature likely to appear in the next version of Java is closures. Closures offer the ability to create a function within another function with shared variables, and they can help a language run more efficiently in a multi-core environment.