Is it a good time to move on from the 8-year-old Java 8? First, let’s see what’s in Java 17. Java Development Kit 17 (JDK 17) was released In October 2021. So why do it, if there is little to gain and it costs a lot of time and money? Java 9 migration – in particular for large, corporate applications – was often difficult, time-consuming, and caused regression problems. Due to the changes introduced with the Jigsaw Project lots of libraries required additional modifications, new versions were released, some of them did not work properly. Java modularization gives great possibilities, solves lots of technical problems, and applies to everyone, but only a relatively small group of users actually needed to deeply understand the changes. It changed a lot, a great lot of things – but internally. Sure, Java 9 did bring one significant change, groundbreaking even – the Jigsaw Project.
A new HTTP client, process API, minor diamond operator and try-with-resources improvements. Java 9 appeared 3 years later, in September 2017, and for a typical developer, it changed next to nothing.
Lambdas, streams, functional programming, extensive API extensions – not to mention MetaSpace or G1 extensions. Java 8 provided lots of language features that made Java Developers want to switch from previous versions. Why is it, after more than 7 years, still the most commonly used version? There are many reasons for that. Java 8, which was released in March 2014, is currently used by 69% of programmers in their main application. The popularity of Java 8 – a little bit of history Let’s take a look at some of the features. The additions to this version will be mentioned later in the article when particular features of Java 8 and 17 are compared. The version number is 8u345-PERF-b31 and its full release notes can be found here. An Oracle Enterprise Performance Pack for Java 8 was released on July 19, 2022. It is also worth noting that Java 8 is still getting some expansions – though only for Oracle Java and its costly Java SE Subscription. What does Java 17 bring? How difficult will the migration be? Is it worth it? I’ll try to answer those questions in this article. It’s the new Long Term Support version, with Oracle Premier Support to last until September 2026 (at least). Especially since on September 14th, 2021, Java 17 was released. That means there’s a good reason to make the move to a new version.
It doesn’t mean that it won’t receive any new updates, but Oracle’s effort put into maintaining it will likely be significantly smaller than it is right now.
In March 2022 Java 8 lost its Oracle Premier Support. However, in December 2022 it was updated with new information regarding the Oracle Enterprise Performance Pack for Java 8. Disclaimer: this article was originally published on October 22, 2021.
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