Time to Migrate to a Modern JDK, Laggards!

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2019 10 01 head

Are you still using Java 8 to run your mission-critical systems?

Are you truly using a six years old technology stack every day?

Are you already applying for a Java laggard club membership?

If you are still using Java 8, you are using technologies released in Spring 2014. You are missing all the improvements in the garbage collector, runtime engine, and various APIs.

Java 11 LTS was released in September 2018. The current LTS release is one year old. You had one year to migrate to this long-term solution version.

It is time to modernize the fundament of your application and invest a small amount of effort in it. The payback is fantastic.

Advantages

  • You have economic gains through

    • Major performance improvements make your application faster. You have either higher customer satisfaction or need fewer processing resources.

    • Major garbage collector updates make your application more predictable. The maximum amount of memory is often lower.

    • Better behavior in container environment translates to less resource usage.

  • You have more legible and maintainable source code.

    • Since Java 8, useful new language features have been introduced, along with new tooling.

    • Various standard APIs were extended with convenience methods.

    • One important change was that internal APIs - largely those classes in packages that started with sun.misc.* - were hidden from use.

    • APIs that are not core to the JDK have also been removed in Java 11 or later. These changes may impact your application, but there is a clear path to avoid these problems.

  • You have to select either the long-term support path or upgrade the Java runtime every six months.

    • When upgrading, the choice you face is whether to use the latest version of Java, currently 13, and be prepared to upgrade every six months. Or upgrade to the latest LTS 11 to give yourself up to three years to think about your next upgrade,

    • Do not be tempted to ignore compiler warnings. Deprecation is being taken much more seriously in this modern Java world, and both Java 10 and Java 11 removed APIs.

    • In less than two years, the next LTS will be released with Java 17. It is scheduled for September 2021.

  • Become more agile

    • Once over this first upgrade, it is worth at least testing the application on the latest version of Java every 6 months, for example, in CI.

    • In all cases, openJDK is now the new default. Various companies - Oracle, Redhat, Amazon, Azul, IBM - provide commercial support for openJDK for different timelines. You are more flexible with your migration timeline.

2019 10 01 jdk releases

How to Migrate?

You do not need to implement Java modules to migrate to Java 9 or beyond. It is worth the effort to slowly support the module approach. Your architecture will become more modular and the interfaces are more clearly defined.

There are basically four incremental phases to fully migrate to Java 11 or later:

  • Run an existing Java application with the JDK.

  • Compile the application with the JDK.

  • Use the new features of the current JDK.

  • Modularize the application to use the module system.

You could recompile and run your solution with the new Java version without code changes.

Changes are necessary if you use deprecated packages or access Sun internal packages. All deprecated packages have a compatible alternate implementation. Often you need to update the import statements. Sun packages have a documented migration path to alternate approaches providing similar functionality. By the way, the Sun company already stated years ago, you should not use these internal packages. So it is time to clean up your code.

Call for Action

Start your migration to a modern JDK now and leave Java 8 behind you.

Anyway, you can only tinker with the date, you will have to migrate at some point.