Upgrading from Java 8 to Java 12

The latest QCon weekly newsletter has a great article on the reasons to upgrade from Java 8 to 12 and the changes to Java support announced by Oracle.

Article key takeaways.

• Since Java 8 a number of useful new language features have been introduced, along with new tooling, and performance improvements particularly for garbage collection.
• When choosing to upgrade the choice you face is whether to upgrade to the latest version of Java (12) 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.
• Don’t 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.  
• One of the changes from Java 9 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. These changes may impact your application but there is a clear path to avoid these problems.
• Once "over the hump" of this first upgrade, it's worth at least testing the application on the latest version of Java every 6 months, for example in CI.

There is a great doc here which discusses OpenJDK etc.

Is Java still Free?

A panel discussion recorded April 9 at QCon London 2019, with video, slides and transcript. The panelists talk about costs, freedom of use, who governs Java/OpenJDK and what providers are for Java infrastructure for the next 5, 10, 15 years.

Mikes Notes

• The clearest explanations I've heard.
• Develop on Java 12 OpenJDK.