I have an application that's running with JRE7 without any problems; however, I want to begin using JRE 8 for testing purposes. Will I be able to test against JRE 8 without any problems and any idea when the JRE will be provided in the buildpack?
Due to planned JRE updates to the Liberty Buildpack and the potential for these updates to affect your application, I would encourage you to tailor your application for Java 8 as soon as possible. You can test against JRE 8 by specifying the following environment variable:
$ cf set-env myapp JBP_CONFIG_IBMJDK "version: 1.8.+"
In fact, towards the end of August, the default JRE will change from v7 to v8. If you're concerned about these changes, please see the article below regarding upcoming changes to the Liberty Runtime:
https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/07/22/liberty-buildpack-updates-java-ee-7/