For clarity, expiration date[0] is just means the JRE will not be considered "up-to-date" anymore. At that point, the JRE will check for updates and ask the user to upgrade.

[0] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/c...

We've using 8 in production for some time, as we slowly migrate things to it. We didn't want to start new projects without using Java 8 language features as it's such a dramatic change.

It has been feature frozen for a long time and even the pre-release builds have had a lot more testing and stabilisation than other software that people don't think twice about using.

There is of course a risk adopting new technology early, it depends what kind of things you are building/running.

We only do backend stuff here, which means we have perfect control over versions. So we're already ready for running 8, and will do so soon.

My employer was using it already, via the prerelease builds (until we found new relic didn't work with it).

3-5 years as usual