Will it be safe to use JDK8 in commercial products? [closed]

Question

I asked this question on Dec 11 '13 and now this question is no longer valid.

Some of the important dates for JDK 1.8 -

2013/09/05 Developer Preview

2014/01/23 Final Release Candidate

2014/03/18 General Availability

Will it be safe to start development with JDK 1.8 in a commercial product now? Though, it's still in developer preview phase, definitely be for testing purposes. Or should I wait for it's general availability release?

In future, main issue will arise when systems get updated with newer releases of JRE's and then some of the API will be deprecated if development starts with JDK 1.7. This may tend to misbehavior of the system processing.

Answer 1

If it's a server app: do you control the server environment? If so, then JDK 8 is an easy yes. In other scenarios, the customer dictates that a product must run on a specific JDK, in which case you can't just break that.

If it's a consumer app: you can always included a JRE in which case you can use whatever version you want. If you need to use the system JRE for some reason, then you probably can't.

JDK 8 is generally very stable from what I've seen and it's a big improvement over JDK 7.