<<And the jury is out on Java 11. If Oracle aggressively pursues monetization from Java, then Java 11 will have a short public (free) maintenance window, then it too will be considered non-production.

I think almost the entire Java user base is going to stay with Java 8 and await Oracle’s final position on all this after their monetization strategy plays out. We will likely be waiting a few years more on this.>>

Even the Java developers on Reddit are only slowly realising just how much trouble they're in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/870xbv/java_11_jdk_roadmap_the_new_features_you_can/

<< We are just moving to JDK8. Anything later is just pie-in-the-sky for us right now.>>

<<My stack doesn't even run on Java 9 thanks to internal classes being hidden. Still waiting for some 3rd-party components to be updated...>>

That sound is the wheels, on fire, flying off and landing in a chicken coop

I feel like this whole thing is being driven entirely by the "cloud" end - ie, bespoke Java software done inhouse and on own servers, offering web services - with ZERO THOUGHT to people who run Java as *clients*.

And even then, zero thought given to support for even IDEs, let alone old existing code which 9,10,11+ is breaking spectacularly.

@natecull
I can't completely figure out Java's failure mode, but it seems like a more extreme case of a pretty common one -- one that has afflicted Oracle's everything for years.

I suspect it has something to do with Java initially being learned only by people who only learned to code for business reasons, who in turn only learned Java, and then those people being put in charge of designing new versions of Java.

@natecull
It's like watching the soviet union collapse, except that nobody gets 'liberated' because all the competitors are collapsing the same way at roughly the same time for the same reasons.

But our corporate data system and our backup system are web-based with Java applets.

I think the corp system is on Oracle Forms even?

All this will just.... stop working in 2019.

Has anyone given any thought to what happens?

Anyone?

At all?

Certainly not any of the Java hype websites. They don't seem to care about 'running Java', just 'programming in Java' with the latest and hottest vulnerabilities added to the language core.

Literally there seems to be a 'write only' culture in the Java world.

I don't understand who all these people are who are 'using' Java because they certainly aren't *running and supporting apps written in it*.

They just code in it and.... push the code...... down a chute somewhere??? to the furnaces?

"What JRE will I use??"

"lol silly person you don't need to use a JRE! Just Imagine... and run the Java with the power of your mind!"

https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/8iat0t/as_the_public_jre_becomes_deprecated_what_jre/

It seems literally nobody is running Java on anything that's not a server....???

BUT MY CORPORATE WEB APPS....!!

@natecull 90% of Java use today probably comes from Minecraft.

I'm secretly hoping they're porting it to C#

@natecull
JBoss, boss. Microservices. Also XML. I encounter Java in unexpected places.

@natecull Java is backwards-compatible, but not forwards-compatible.

What the new moves are meant to do is get ops teams across the globe out of the long-standing habit of saying things like "we're just fine with Java 7" when Oracle & the OpenJDK community releases Java 9.

Developers get frustrated because they can't use the new shinies, and there's no real incentive for libs/frameworks to update because most of the world can't run the new shinies yet anyway.

@bobstechsite

Java 9 is already *desupported*.

Java 10 is out, but will be desupported in September.

Java 11, if and when it ships, MAY be supported like an actual product - but may require paying lots of money to Oracle.

And even then, it won't run in the browser!

To access our Oracle server!

HOW IS ANY OF THIS GOING TO WORK???

@natecull as I don't join the Oracle until the 29th I'm probably not the best person to answer that question.

Read my toot again, my intention was to state an example! A Java 8 app should run fine on JRE 10 (in theory).

This practise you're decrying is something home users have experienced for years. The old version of Java gets deprecated and replaced with a new one, then their apps keep working like they did before.

@bobstechsite I'm talking about appLETS. In the browser.

Our corporate web systems use them.

The official word from Oracle is that applets are simply going AWAY.

@bobstechsite

https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/jdk9_plugin.xml

<< Oracle has deprecated the Java browser plugin in Java Standard Edition Development Kit 9 (JDK 9)... This browser plugin will be removed from the Oracle JDK and JRE in a future Java SE release>>

which is nice but, like, we have applets, we use them

@bobstechsite in fact, running applets is LITERALLY THE ONLY REASON WE HAVE JAVA ON OUR WORKSTATIONS AT ALL

@natecull got it. Your thread was quite long so I must have missed it.

If it helps, Oracle have foreseen exactly this problem: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/migratingfromapplets-2872444.pdf

Obviously there's some work involved. But they gave the world 2 years' warning!

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/24/oracle_reveals_java_applet_api_deprecation_plan/

@bobstechsite Right, "we are turning off all your software, in two years"

Imagine if Microsoft just said "all your windows programs? They'll all stop working in two years".

It's gonna an interesting September.

@bobstechsite Like there's this big scramble to save Flash apps?

Imagine that, but lots of corporate systems, and nobody's yet quite realised they're getting turned off.

@natecull it's worth remembering that "out of support" doesn't necessarily mean "stops working" for any given version of technology.

It may be that ops teams' short term solution is "let's not upgrade" & sandbox the system. If they still want support though then that still means spending money.

The most sensible solution is that people heed 2 year deprecation warnings (and multiple reminder emails if they're on subscription plans) & upgrade their systems or convert to "Web Start".

@bobstechsite Yes, I *am* ops team. Hence my panic.

But the thing is, you see, WE DON'T WRITE OUR WEB APPS. We buy them.

We have software we have bought that will stop working.

And no: Web Start is NOT a solution because that's going away too. People were stunned to hear this in November.

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2017-November/004592.html

@bobstechsite And I'm in education, so we don't always have money to be always upgrading.

Lots of global edu resources are just gonna die.

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2017-November/004598.html

<<For example, my high school calculus teacher wrote a beautiful integration-modeling Applet with Swing, which was
eventually migrated to WebStart. I seriously doubt the tool would exist ifit required OS-specific bundling. Instead the class would be sharing unversioned JAR files.>>

@bobstechsite Here's another one: a medical webapp that's just gonna evaporate.

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2017-November/004597.html

@natecull my question in that case is: have you contacted the vendors of these solutions? (I alluded to this in my last toot with the "email reminders" thing)

If you still have a support contract with them then one would expect those people to pick up the slack and keep you running.

(I'm now a bit confused about the Web Start situation too. I hadn't spotted that thread)

@bobstechsite We're going to have to get onto that, I guess. I don't make purchasing decisions. I have pointed out the impending train 'o' doom to my manager and hope it gets handled.

@natecull there used to be a "client" jvm with quicker startup and reduced memory consumption, etc

the fact that they didn't even bother porting this to 64-bit (this was even before Oracle) was an early giveaway that they really only care about servers

@natecull My take is that Oracle doesn’t care if they kill Java or not. In fact with all the bugs and exploits they’re probably happy to see it go. And in true Oracle style what better way to kill it than to charge a metric buttload for support until people stop using it?

@natecull How does this affect Open JDK or is this going to be a case of 6-8 still being out there in the wild, and Java 10+ being the alleged production releases.

@craigmaloney Java 11 I think is the first LTS release - and even then it may be 'for paying Oracle customers only',

Utter, utter trainwreck.