For me, the best part of this release is the fact that the TLS stack has been significantly improved, and is now quite good. The lack of some critical features

For me, the best part of this release is the fact that the TLS stack has been significantly improved, and is now quite good. The lack of some critical features in Java 7 (e.g., inability to enforce cipher suite order) made TLS effectively unusable. The list of improvements is quite long, actually: - Server Cipher Suite Preference - Strong Server Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman Parameters - Authenticated (GCM) Suites - Hardware Acceleration on Intel and AMD processors - Server-Side SNI Support - Ability to disable client-initiated renegotiation - TLS 1.2 enabled by default in client mode - Clients support Ephemeral DH over 1024 bits More details here: http://blog.ivanristic.com/2014/03/ssl-tls-improvements-in-java-8.html http://blog.ivanristic.com/2014/03/ssl-tls-improvements-in-j... And there are more security improvements documented here: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/features#core/sec http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/features#core/sec