For me current GWT development governance achieves a delicate balance
between stability and new features.
GWT has been compatible with 8 long enough for me to jump to 11, then 17
and now to 21.
So for me personally it's ok to drop support for 11.
I can relate with other people that haven't had the opportunity to do the
jump though.
Finally I believe that if your dev environment is 21 it would be difficult
to produce compatible code with 8.
So most people that will do the jump, they will probably bite the bullet
and will do it both client side and server side.
Vassilis
On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 12:46 PM Thomas Broyer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Monday, October 27, 2025 at 10:37:49 AM UTC+1 [email protected]
> wrote:
>
>
> https://devclass.com/2025/01/30/state-of-java-report-shows-strong-migration-from-java-8-rise-of-apache-spark/
> from January 2025 lists 46% of Java projectcs being on Java 8 and older.
> I'm not aware of stats about GWT usage; my assumption is that not too
> many new projects are being started with GWT these days. There may well
> be a correlation of GWT users with users of older JDKs.
>
> For us, with https://github.com/SAP/sailing-analytics we have been using
> GWT since 2011. Our production runtime is still on SAPJVM8 for a number
> of reasons, although we also ensure runtime compatibility up to Java 24.
>
> […]
>
> Just keep the 46% in mind, most of which you've already cut off when
> requiring Java 11...
>
>
> Server runtime is different from GWT tooling at dev/build time.
> GWT server libs (gwt-servlet, requestfactory-server) still support running
> on Java 8:
> https://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html#Release_Notes_2_12_0
> What we're talking about (still, I believe) is requiring JDK 17+ for
> running the GWT compiler and code server.
>
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>
--
Vassilis Virvilis
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