Neo4j 2 and Java 8

Question

Java 8 is being released this week. When using neo4j 1.9 with Java 7 we saw warnings popping up that only 6 was supported but we never had any problem with the 1.9/7 combination.

I know that neo4j 2 cannot use anything less than Java 7, but are there any restrictions for neo4j 2 to run on Java 8?

Answer 1

We are currently using neo4j in combination with Java 8 at our company and (for ~3.5 months) I didn't notice anything wrong related to Java 8 at all. Yes, there are warnings, but still, it looks alright to me. We used both 2.0.0 and 2.0.1.

By the way, not only java-related crashes were not encountered by me, but even neo4j itself haven't crashed not once during the aforementioned period.

Upd. (18.11.2014) It's been almost a year and I still have no complaints concerning Java 8 compatibility.

Answer 2

The reason for that is that 1.9.x is officially supported with Oracle JDK 1.6, Neo4j 2.0.0/2.0.1 are supported with Oracle JDK 7. Running the full quality assurance pipeline is a resource intensive process, that's why the Neo4j guys decided officially support only the configurations mentioned above.

This does not mean that Neo4j will not run with other JDKs as well, however you do this on your own risk and will not get commercial grade support for this.

I'm not aware of any technical restrictions why Neo4j 2.0 will not run with JDK 8.