News

Java Annotated Monthly – September 2018

Java 11 is due out this month, so you’d expect a lot of Java 11 news.  There is some, but the main noise in the community is not around the new language features, but about Oracle’s updated support model. This is causing panic of the “Oh my goodness Oracle is going to start charging for Java”, which is a) not true because actually Oracle has always charged for commercial support and b) not true in the way a lot of people are saying it. Read on for more information.

JavaAnnotatedMonthly@2x

Java Is Still Free

There’s so much noise, confusion and nonsense out there about Oracle’s changes to support for Java that this deserves its own section. Here’s a short version, more details available in each of the articles:

  • You can still download the Oracle JDK for free and use it for free in development/test environments.
  • Oracle’s JDK 8 will no longer receive public updates after January 2019.
  • As of Java 11, OpenJDK has feature parity with Oracle’s JDK, so if you want to use a free JDK, download OpenJDK for your platform.
  • The ongoing support / updates for “older” versions of Java (including 9 & soon 10) has changed since the introduction of the six-monthly release cycle.
    • For Oracle’s commercially-licensed JDK, Java 9 is no longer updated/supported, and, when Java 11 comes out, there’ll be no support for Java 10.  If you’re currently using Oracle’s JDK, you need to look at which version(s) you’re using and which versions you want to use going forward, and you need to understand Oracle’s support model (and prices) if you want to use it in production.
    • If using OpenJDK, you may need to upgrade to the latest version as soon as it’s available. This is the same advice that applies to any free open source library or framework.
    • Other vendors may offer support for Java 9 and other versions.
  • If you want full support for the version of Java you’re running in production, you should compare and contrast the support models and prices of Azul, IBM, Oracle and Red Hat. Note that these companies always had free and paid for services / support, so none of this is really new.

More details:

Java News

I’ve decided to split out news / updates from tutorials for this month, since some people want to know what’s going on but some people are just interested in the how-tos.

Java 11

Java 11 should be out in September. The new 6-month release cycle makes this less exciting than the Java 8 or 9 releases, but it’s still an important one, especially as this is where a) OpenJDK should have all the features you expect from the Oracle JDK you were (probably) previously using and b) for many JDK distributions this release replaces Java 9 and 10, so if you were using either of those you should be upgrading as soon as possible.

Java Future

Honestly this new release cadence is creating way more sections in Annotated Monthly that you’d expect. This might be ripe for refactoring.

Java Tutorials

In this section we look at hands-on examples of code and architecture.

Languages, Frameworks and Libraries

Culture & Community

I’m researching for a presentation on Career Advice for Programmers, so this section is quite career-focused this month.

Events

We’re barely into autumn but the torrent of conferences is upon us! Let’s look at all the events for September, and noteworthy ones for the next three months.

And Finally

Here’s a chance to catch up on the IntelliJ IDEA and other JetBrains news that you might have missed:

I’ve never officially said this on the newsletter but it was always implied: if you have any interesting or useful Java / JVM news to share via Java Annotated Monthly, drop me a message via Twitter.

Subscribe to Java Annotated

image description