Friday, March 21, 2014

Release of Whole Language Workbench - Kepler SR2 for Java 8 Edition

Following the official release of Java 8we are pleased to announce that an updated milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.

The Eclipse IDE 4.3.2 with the feature patch to support Java 8 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution.
The Java 8 represents a big step forward for the Java community and we want to be able to take full advantage of its features; so we decided to make Java 8 the required execution environment for the Whole Language Workbench.

A few years ago, following the release of Java 5 we redesigned the Whole Platform to adopt generics. For more than a year, we introduced a few workarounds in our code in order to be able to compile with both the official Java compiler and the one bundled with Eclipse JDT. 

Yesterday, we had to perform a few code changes, just to be able to rebuild our platform with Java 8 instead of Java 7. I am not able to tell you how much of them are due to changes in the Language specification; but the two compilers have reported a small different set of errors.

The news is that even if the history had to repeat itself, we encourage you to start using Java 8 today and we join in thanking both Oracle and the Eclipse Foundation for the great job they have already done.

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