The goal of this Project was to produce an open-source reference implementation of the Java SE 8 Platform Specification defined by JSR 337 in the Java Community Process.
JDK 8 reached General Availability on 18 March 2014. Production-ready binary distributions based on the JDK 8 code base are available now from Oracle and will be available soon in most Linux distributions.
Development of JDK 8 Update Releases is being done in the nearby JDK 8 Updates Project.
Content
JDK 8 was the second part of "Plan B". The single driving feature of the release was Project Lambda. (Project Jigsaw was initially proposed for this release but later dropped). Additional features proposed via the JEP Process were included so long as they fit into the overall schedule required for Lambda. Detailed information on the features included in the release can be found on the features page.
Schedule
The original schedule aimed to ship the release in early September 2013, but due to an increased focus on browser-related security issues that date was not achievable. The final schedule, proposed on 2013年4月18日 and adopted on 2013年4月26日, was as follows:
2012年04月26日 M1 2012年06月14日 M2 2012年08月02日 M3 2012年09月13日 M4 2012年11月29日 M5 2013年01月31日 M6 2013年06月13日 M7 Feature Complete 2013年09月05日 M8 Developer Preview 2014年01月23日 M9 Final Release Candidate 2014年03月18日 GA General Availability
Further information on milestone content and the final phases of the release can be found on the milestones page.