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I do wonder about this. Granted, Java 9 (and 10) are not LTS releases - we'll have to wait for 11 for that. (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779

I do wonder about this. Granted, Java 9 (and 10) are not LTS releases - we'll have to wait for 11 for that. (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html) But, Java 8 will stop receiving public updates next year, and pretty much everywhere I've looked, folks are sticking on Java 8. I am hoping I'm wrong, but I wonder if we will see Java 8 be forked, and live on, by community effort, as the cost to maintain it would be lower than the cost of risking moving to Java 11. For a lot of businesses, I don't think the reality has set in yet, and I don't think they're going to realize what situation they're in until Java 8 hits EOL.

pjmlp 9y ago
There are companies still deploying Java 1.4 into production in 2018, just because they don't want to touch their beloved servers. This is nothing new.
- PhaseBlue 9y ago
  Granted this is an extreme case but large, complex critical systems need a certain amount of stability and upgrades across Java releases are not quite as easy as just touching the servers.
- lvh 9y ago
  Would you agree that the breakage between 1.4 and 1.5, 1.5 and 1.6, 1.6 and 1.7, 1.7 and 1.8 is not comparable to the breakage that Jigsaw alone introduced between 1.8 and 1.9?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Yes, I do agree. However stuff like JDBC interface changes comes up as breaking changes in previous releases. In what concerns Java 9, Mark Reinhold keeps doing presentations about how all Java relevant frameworks and tools are already Java 9 compliant. Including many that they validated against in Maven repositories. Last presentation I saw was at FOSDEM. So it appears to be a major issue to anyone wanting to migrate Java 9 without updating the frameworks as well, having some kind of special case library, or using APIs that were always documented as internal.
    - lvh 9y ago
      The QA outreach page [0] suggests maybe about half the projects are ready. The ones that aren't include Netty and SLF4J. Those aren't small projects. Is that page outdated or does "JDK9 ready" not really mean "JDK9 ready"? EDIT: Maybe it's outdated; SLF4J and Netty do claim to be JDK9-ready. [0]: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/quality/Quality+Outreach https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/quality/Quality+Outrea...
vbezhenar 9y ago
Honestly I never needed any java updates on server side. I'm sure that they are fixing something important, but I've yet to encounter any bugs. My recent projects should run on Win32 and given that they dropped support, I won't migrate from Java 8 even if it won't be updated.
- jarym 9y ago
  You may not have encountered any bugs but what about the vulnerabilities they’re fixing - do you not care to have those fixes?
  - vbezhenar 9y ago
    Can you provide examples of those vulnerabilities? All vulnerabilities I'm aware of are from Java applet technology and not applicable to server applications. The only vulnerability that I can remember is something about parsing float, but even that was very low risk.
    - slrz 9y ago
      All those TLS/SSL implementation vulnerabilities with fancy names like POODLE, for example. https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/poodlecve-2014-3566-2339408.html https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/poodlecve... There's a lot more but it of course depends on the subset of the JDK that you're using. Look over the release notes for historical JDK updates.
      - vbezhenar 9y ago
        I don't use TLS and even if I would use it, I would use nginx frontend. My subset is fairy common, Spring+JDBC, sometimes Hibernate, sometimes pure servlets, but basically all interaction between outer world is via HTTP interface implemented in Tomcat.
        toyg 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago

There are companies still deploying Java 1.4 into production in 2018, just because they don't want to touch their beloved servers. This is nothing new.

PhaseBlue 9y ago
Granted this is an extreme case but large, complex critical systems need a certain amount of stability and upgrades across Java releases are not quite as easy as just touching the servers.
lvh 9y ago
Would you agree that the breakage between 1.4 and 1.5, 1.5 and 1.6, 1.6 and 1.7, 1.7 and 1.8 is not comparable to the breakage that Jigsaw alone introduced between 1.8 and 1.9?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Yes, I do agree. However stuff like JDBC interface changes comes up as breaking changes in previous releases. In what concerns Java 9, Mark Reinhold keeps doing presentations about how all Java relevant frameworks and tools are already Java 9 compliant. Including many that they validated against in Maven repositories. Last presentation I saw was at FOSDEM. So it appears to be a major issue to anyone wanting to migrate Java 9 without updating the frameworks as well, having some kind of special case library, or using APIs that were always documented as internal.
  - lvh 9y ago
    The QA outreach page [0] suggests maybe about half the projects are ready. The ones that aren't include Netty and SLF4J. Those aren't small projects. Is that page outdated or does "JDK9 ready" not really mean "JDK9 ready"? EDIT: Maybe it's outdated; SLF4J and Netty do claim to be JDK9-ready. [0]: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/quality/Quality+Outreach https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/quality/Quality+Outrea...

vbezhenar 9y ago

Honestly I never needed any java updates on server side. I'm sure that they are fixing something important, but I've yet to encounter any bugs. My recent projects should run on Win32 and given that they dropped support, I won't migrate from Java 8 even if it won't be updated.

jarym 9y ago
You may not have encountered any bugs but what about the vulnerabilities they’re fixing - do you not care to have those fixes?
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  Can you provide examples of those vulnerabilities? All vulnerabilities I'm aware of are from Java applet technology and not applicable to server applications. The only vulnerability that I can remember is something about parsing float, but even that was very low risk.
  - slrz 9y ago
    All those TLS/SSL implementation vulnerabilities with fancy names like POODLE, for example. https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/poodlecve-2014-3566-2339408.html https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/poodlecve... There's a lot more but it of course depends on the subset of the JDK that you're using. Look over the release notes for historical JDK updates.
    - vbezhenar 9y ago
      I don't use TLS and even if I would use it, I would use nginx frontend. My subset is fairy common, Spring+JDBC, sometimes Hibernate, sometimes pure servlets, but basically all interaction between outer world is via HTTP interface implemented in Tomcat.
      - toyg 9y ago