Java 8 was released 2014-03-18. Support from Oracle will end "not earlier than" January 2019.
Resources
Notable New Features
Lambda expressions.
Method references.
static
anddefault
methods in interfaces.Streams.
Optional
(replacing Guava functionality)Nashorn
New date and time API (replacing Joda-Time functionality)
Base64
Functional programming interfaces (replacing Guava functionality)
Lambda expressions are foundational for both the Stream
and functional programming features.
Nashorn is compatible with ECMAScript 5.1
See column "JJS 1.8" in Kangax’s ECMAScript 5 compatibility table
Compare with column "JJS 1.8" in Kangax’s ECMAScript 6 compatibility table