Stephen Colebourne said in an interview at last year’s JAX London that “Java 8 will satisfy us for a good few years until there’s something really big and important.” If that “something” is Java 11, only time will tell.
As you surely already know, public updates for Java 8 will remain available for individual, personal use through at least the end of 2020 but business users won’t be that lucky — the ‘public updates’ tap will be turned off in January 2019. That said, it’s time to start thinking about the future.
In a message to the OpenJDK mailing list, Andrew Haley, Java Platform Lead Engineer at Red Hat urged Java developers to get involved with OpenJDK. This makes a lot of sense since Red Hat’s Rich Sharples told us yesterday that “OpenJDK is the future of Java” so if you want to be involved in Java’s development, this is how to do it.
If you’re already a JDK 8u committer or reviewer, that’s great. If you’re involved in OpenJDK but you’re not a JDK 8u committer, you should get someone to propose you as a JDK 8u committer, Haley explained. If you’re not an OpenJDK committer, you should submit some patches in order to get committer status.
It’s important to get involved now because once Oracle relinquishes their leadership and the community takes over, they “won’t have much bandwidth to sponsor your patches if you don’t have commit access,” Haley warned. Therefore, it would be a good idea to act now.
Above all, thank you in advance to everyone who’ll be working on jdk8u. I think we can make a real success of this, for a long time to come.
– Andrew Haley
SEE ALSO: “Developers will see Java 11 as a better, cleaner implementation of the features they use in Java 8”
Java 8 reigns supreme ?!
Earlier this year [right before Java 10 was released], we asked JAXenter readers what Java version(s) they were using. Almost 250 people said they were still using Java 8, but this doesn’t mean they were using it for personal purposes. As one respondent pointed out in the comments section, this doesn’t automatically mean they are using it because they want to, but because they have to —in a business context. That said, January 2019 is a pretty important date for business users who don’t have commercial license.
Java 8’s popularity shouldn’t come as a shock, though. When Java 9 was released, we naturally expected that it would take some time getting used to it. When Java 11 was released, we asked nine Java experts if the latest release is important enough to dethrone Java 8. The answer is more nuanced but we tried to narrow it down.
With Java 11 enforcing modularity, this will be the first real migration milestone for many projects. We now have a reasonable number of experiences about how to use the module system and how to migrate and build new software on top.
– Markus Eisele
Read the entire interview series here.
Since a lot of people are still using JDK 8 [for business purposes], it’s safe to assume that it should be kept alive and it will, as Haley explained. If you want to be part of JDK 8u’s future, now’s the time to get involved.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
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Source : JAXenter
