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We are planning to migrate our project from Oracle JDK to OpenJDK. I have some questions regarding the same.

  • After doing some analysis I found that OpenJDK will have a feature release every 6 months which is only supported until the next feature release.It's essentially a continuous stream of releases targeted to developers. Now my question is will it be a good idea to migrate to OpenJDK. Because if the above statement is correct then we need to upgrade OpenJDK in our application every 6 months

    Ref : Differences between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK

  • What are the basic changes required to do this migration. When I say basic changes, I mean I need to understand in very high level.One thing I know that is Oracle JDK and Open JDK are having different jar licences. So do I need to replace all Oracle JDK jars with OpenJDK jars as its mentioned in Migrating to OpenJDK from Oracle JDK ?

Currently we are using :

  • JDK 1.8
  • Tomcat 8
  • Windows Operating System for development. Services gets deployed in linux OS
  • Maven Build tool

Appreciate your help.

Thanks

Rahman
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    This is a question only you can answer. If you want to work with the newest version of OpenJDK then yes, you will be forced to updated this once every 6 months. We can't know, we don't know your project structure, how difficult license clearing for new versions of software is for your company and so on. – Ben Jul 06 '18 at 09:40
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    "will it be a good idea to migrate to OpenJDK?" Why are you even planning on doing it if you don't know whether its a good idea? – Michael Jul 06 '18 at 09:41
  • @Michael Its in very initial stage. We are doing analysis and trying to find out if its good to go – Rahman Jul 06 '18 at 09:43
  • Am I misinformed that Oracle will bring the new JDK release every 6 months also? – zlakad Jul 06 '18 at 09:49
  • @Ben Thanks for your reply. Just wanted a guidance. Now I have to do the impact analysis on it and will proceed further. If you have the answer of my second question that will be helpful – Rahman Jul 06 '18 at 09:50
  • @zlakad You're not. That's the planned release schedule, at least. As such, not every version of Oracle's JDK is getting long term support any more. – Michael Jul 06 '18 at 09:51
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    @Rehman Well, in the two questions you've linked have you found a **single** compelling reason to migrate? – Michael Jul 06 '18 at 09:53
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    @Michael Yep, Java 8 already has a long term support, Java 9 and 10 are the steps until Java 11 (September), right? – zlakad Jul 06 '18 at 09:56
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    @zlakad Yes, exactly. And [Java 9 is already broken (excluding compiler flag workarounds) and won't be fixed](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50683786/why-does-arrayidx-a-increase-idx-once-in-java-8-but-twice-in-java-9-and-1), so IMO no one should be using it any more. – Michael Jul 06 '18 at 10:00

1 Answers1

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Now my question is will it be a good idea to migrate to OpenJDK

For Java 11 you might want to, though by Java 11 they will be almost identical.

So do I need to replace all Oracle JDK jars with OpenJDK jars

I would install a version of OpenJDK and use the JARs which came with it. I wouldn't mix and match them.

JDK 1.8

I am not sure gain anything by migrating Java 8. Oracle Java 8 is still supported at least until Jan 2019. After that, you might not get any update, but you might not with OpenJDK either.

If your concern is getting support for Java 8, I suggest contacting a company which will give commercial support Java 8 such as Azul for what seemed like a reasonable price. https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu/zulu-windows/

Peter Lawrey
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  • Thanks for your reply. My concern is not with Java 8. we are going to change it anyways. If we stick with Oracle JDK then we will go for Java 11. But before that we just want to know if OpenJDK is good to migrate to – Rahman Jul 06 '18 at 10:03
  • I would wait for Java 11 to be released in Sept this year and then wait until Tomcat supports it. Then I would use Open or Oracle JDK 11. Unfortunately there is not much detail on how Java 11 will be publicly supported http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html Also not much detail on the price from my experience. – Peter Lawrey Jul 06 '18 at 10:09