My first project in the technology world was to migrate an enterprise Java 4 application to Java 6. The original estimation for this migration was two months, and it went up to six months later due to issues that popped up suddenly.
Why am I talking about this now?
On September 14, Java Development Kit (JDK) 17 will be released, and it marks the next LTS release for the Java programming language after Java 11 LTS release.
Spring, a popular framework for Java web applications, is baselining their new framework release on JDK 17. I’m thinking it is going to be fun upgrading applications from Java 6 or 8.
A Java major version release was a big thing for the Java community. A lot of API changes, deprecations, new features, etc. Of course, with the new half-yearly release model, things have changed quite a bit with many features battle-tested by several application platforms built on Java, with most of the features backward compatible to the LTS release Java 8, Java 11.
Java 17 is the latest LTS release, after Java 11. It has features like ZGC, Records, Sealed Classes even though projects like Loom, Panama, Amber are still WIP.
If you are looking to get more information about the new release or Java in general, please take a look at these –
