[ludicast]

For me the most exciting part is that they are bringing in support for Java 8. Though lambdas don't impress anyone already using a functional language on the JVM, the introduction of Nashorn and the merger of JodaTime are pretty awesome.

Java 8 is the most exciting release since Java 2 in my opinion.

[ebiester]

I would say Java 5 instead. Even as poorly as Generics were implemented, it was a lot better than having nothing.