Comment by schmichael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schmichael | Hacker News Reader

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It seems like the Java community isn't too concerned with JDK7's EOL. I recently did a survey of Java 8 support for the JVM services we use and only one service explicitly supported JDK8:

* Cassandra - supports JDK8, docs only referenced 7 (I contacted DataStax)

* Elasticsearch - explicitly mentions exactly what JDK 7 & 8 versions are supported. Yay!

* Kafka - Docs only mention 7. Scala incompatibilities prevent all but the latest version from ever using JDK8 (without manual patching): https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1624

* Zookeeper - Only mentions "JDK 6 or up" so... yay? Seems to work as promised.

Point being: Only 1 out of 4 major Java services even bothered explicitly mentioning Java 8 support (ES) -- and it doesn't even discourage use of the EOL'd 7.

Java is a complex ecosystem. I think a JDK being EOL'd means something different in the Java ecosystem then it does to the rest of us.

Java puts massive effort into backwards compatibility; (almost) anything that runs on JDK7 will run without modification on JDK8. And "big" frameworks naturally try to be compatible for as many users as possible - if you look at smaller one-person libraries you're more likely to find JDK8-only code.

The problem is that bugs in the JDK itself will no longer be fixed in v7; Oracle's line is (reasonably) "you should update to JDK8, all your code will work fine".

There's a subtle distinction here... It's pretty common for a widely used Java library to be compiled and/or coded against an older JDK version e.g. JDK 5 or 6. This is seldom an issue as most well written libraries written using JDK5 or JDK6 will work perfectly with and have been tested on JDK 8.

I would definitely NOT say that the Java community isn't too concerned with JDK7 EOL. No responsible developer is going to run a network-facing application on an EOL unpatched JVM as it's a security risk (unless you fork out for a support contract for older versions).

FWIW, Google is patching and updating JDK7 for appengine beyond Oracle's EOL.

> Java is a complex ecosystem. I think a JDK being EOL'd means something different in the Java ecosystem then it does to the rest of us.

JDK Forward compatibility makes this mostly a moot point for the lib developers. Upgrading your JDK is your own responsibility, the rest is expected to just work.

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