Hi everyone, When I read the history of the GitHub PR open right for adding Java 11 support, I learned that modern Java doesn't support what the OpenWhisk contract does right now, where environment variables are mutated at runtime. I thought of another approach. I left details in the GitHub PR in a comment ( https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-runtime-java/pull/82#issuecomment-851799588), but I'll repeat the main idea here.
Instead of adding environment variables, which is problematic since the environment has already been created (the runtime is the environment, and the user action is a "hook" so to speak that the runtime dynamically links to), a second parameter is added to the user action. The first parameter is the traditional "params" where it's the values set at deploy time, which are optionally overridden at request time, and the second parameter is these values that used to be added to the environment with the __OW_ prefix. I have an example Java 11 runtime working ( https://github.com/mattwelke/apache-openwhisk-runtime-java). I tested it on IBM Cloud Functions as a Docker action. That repo has a strange structure. It doesn't use Maven or Gradle. But don't worry, I wouldn't expect code like that to be checked into the official project. I'm not very familiar with Maven or Gradle yet because I'm new to coding things in Java outside of playing around in IntelliJ's GUI in school. I thought a fun way to learn Java would be to make Java 11 and Java 16 runtimes for OpenWhisk. A custom build system where I could focus only on what I needed was the quickest way for me to make a custom runtime. Curious to hear peoples' thoughts on this new user action contract idea.
