There is an article at InfoQ that discusses Oracle’s support strategy [1]. It contains a chart that shows the support lifetime for all Oracle releases. [2] It references a blog post from Azul discussing Oracle’s support strategy. [3] These charts are confirmed by Oracle’s roadmap. [4]. The end of public updates for Java 7 was in April 2015 and the end of premier support is July 2019. [5]
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First, based on this and the decline in the interest in Java 7 and that we are now about 3 years past the last public updates I am fine with making Java 8 our minimum version along with the release of Log4j 3.0. FWIW, while SLF4J still supports Java 5, as of today Logback 1.3.0 now requires a minimum of Java 8. After that things start to get strange. I think we will have to take advantage of the multi-release jar support more and more in the future because I don’t see how we could ever make Java 9 or 10 the minimum supported version since Oracle will effectively drop support for them 6 months after they are introduced. I would think we would have to wait until Java 8 usage declines to the levels Java 7 currently is before upgrading and at that time we would have to skip all the way to Java 11. Whatever we decide to do I would prefer if we could publish our JVM support strategy on the web site. Ralph 1. https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/01/JavaSupportJan18 <https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/01/JavaSupportJan18> 2. https://res.infoq.com/news/2018/01/JavaSupportJan18/en/resources/1java-se-lifecycle-5-year-timeline-1024x683-1517328730133.jpg <https://res.infoq.com/news/2018/01/JavaSupportJan18/en/resources/1java-se-lifecycle-5-year-timeline-1024x683-1517328730133.jpg> 3. https://www.azul.com/java-stable-secure-free-choose-two-three/ <https://www.azul.com/java-stable-secure-free-choose-two-three/> 4. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html> 5. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html#java-commercial-offerings <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html#java-commercial-offerings>
