Overview of Java SE 8

One of the goals of Java EE 8 was better alignment with Java SE 8. SE 8 was a major update; it was released in March 2014 and brought with it some major changes to the language and APIs. Lambdas, streams, default methods, and functional-style programming were introduced and were the highlights of the release. With these capabilities, the method of writing code was no longer going to be the same. A few other noteworthy additions in this release were optionals, repeating annotations, the date/time APIs, type annotations, and CompletableFutures.

If you would like to dig deeper into this release, then considering reading a book specific to Java 8. Here, we will cover just enough for getting to grips with some of the language features.