About Java versions, with a Java 1.8 it should be good.
The viewpoint specification files (and specially the .conf one) refers by default to Java 1.6 when you create a viewpoint project but this is not a strict mandatory requirement and a Java 1.8 would work exactly the same.
So you should indeed update your generated projects to refer to Java 1.8 instead of 1.6.
Regards,
Arnaud