Infinispan 8.0.0.Final

Dear all,

it is with the greatest pleasure that we announce the first stable release of Infinispan 8.

 The number "8" is quite special for Infinispan for two reasons:

• it has been embedded in our logo, disguised as the infinity symbol, since the very beginning
• it marks the move of the Infinispan code-base to Java 8

So without further ado, let's see what Infinispan 8 brings to the table:

• A new functional-style API for interacting with caches which takes advantage of all the language goodies introduced by Java 8, such as lambdas, Optional, CompletableFuture, etc. We have already started a blog series describing the API, and the reasoning behind it and we want your opinion too.
• Support for the Java 8's Streams API which, in the context of Infinispan, becomes fully distributed: parallel streams become truly parallel !
• Indexing and querying received a host of new features: Continuous querying, grouping and aggregation, simultaneous querying on both indexed and non-indexed fields.
• Expired entries now trigger events, thus allowing your applications to perform operations like refresh from an external datasource, archiving, etc.
• Eviction is now memory size-aware, so you can define the maximum amount of memory you want a cache to grow to, before entries are removed or passivated to an external store. 
• Infinispan Server now fully supports domain mode, and that is now the recommended way for clustered operations.
• We have a new management console for Infinispan Server which will greatly simplify configuration and monitoring without requiring an external console. This is evolving rapidly and we will be adding quite a lot of functionality in the following months.
• We are working hard to reduce the number of resources used by Infinispan and removing many internal locks and increasing concurrency. This work is ongoing and you will see further improvements during the 8.x series.
• We now provide integrations with Spark and Hadoop so that you can use all of the wonderful processing tools from those ecosystem against data stored in Infinispan.
• Both the declarative and programmatic configuration API have been enhanced to support templates and configuration inheritance. It should make your life easier when you need many caches configured in the same way.
• A cache store for Redis implemented by Simon Paulger. Thanks for the contribution !
• Lots more... Look at the resolved issues to find out what else we've fixed.

We have also made some significant changes to our website:

• clearer layout
• brand new use-case-driven examples
• the download page for cache stores are now clearly divides core cache stores (i.e. the ones included in Infinispan release), extra stores (i.e. ones that need to be downloaded separately) and the version compatibility
• project references, i.e. other open-source projects which use Infinispan

The 8.0 release marks only the beginning of a number of exciting things we will be working on, so please check out our roadmap.

An important note: we will be maintaining the 7.2 branch of Infinispan for quite a while, so, if you are still stuck with Java 7, you shouldn't worry about upgrading just yet... unless you want to use the new stuff :)