In the first quarter of 2016, we will release a new version of the OpenMRS Platform that requires Java 8. As some of you may know, Java 6 reached end-of-life in February 2013 and is no longer supported. There has been a growing push from developers in the community to do the upgrade so they can utilize new language features that come with java 8.
We would like implementations to begin preemptively upgrading their production servers to Java 8 in order to address any Java 8-specific issues with their environment or other tools. To help, we put together some useful notes to help Upgrading to Java 8 for Implementations. However, we are not yet aware of implementations running production systems on Java 8. If you are currently running OpenMRS on Java 8 or have a testing or staging servers on which you can install Java 8 and report any issues, please let us know. Your input would be very valuable to the OpenMRS Community.
For module developers, consider building your modules against Java 8 now. You don’t have to use the new language features, especially if you wish to support older versions of OpenMRS, but dependencies and tools you use in development might need to be upgraded to work on Java 8. In a worst case scenario, you might have to fix a few bugs. We have put together notes that might be useful to you about Upgrading to Java 8 for Developers.
We are really excited about the upgrade and we want it to be as smooth as possible for you.