Going to Java 8 can provide a lot of benefit to an application like cTAKES.
The new features added to Java 8 are a game changer in terms of doing data
pipelining. The streams functionality and the ability to do functional
programming gives you the opportunity get 'parallelism almost for free.'
That means the jvm can use all the available cpu cores without the need to
explicitly write multi-threaded code, as long as you write functional style
code (which basically means no shared variables.) This style of writing code
would also make it easier to transition to a distributed processing environment
like Spark or Hadoop.
Of course, to get the benefit of 'parallelism almost for free' would require
using streams when working with collections and files, along with refactoring
important pieces of existing code to do the same.
'Java 8 In Action' is a really great book to get up to speed on the new
features.
From: Pei Chen <chen...@apache.org>
To: "dev@ctakes.apache.org" <dev@ctakes.apache.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 2:00 PM
Subject: Re: CTAKES-377 : Upgrade to Java 8
+1 upgrading to Java 8; been using it unofficially locally.
On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Finan, Sean
<sean.fi...@childrens.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Can anybody out there think of a reason why we shouldn't upgrade to Java 8?
> Please comment on Jira.
>
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CTAKES-377
>
> Thanks,
> Sean
>
>
