Proposal: Bump minimum JDK version for JavaFX 20 to JDK 17

[Thomas Reinhardt]

Hi,

I would assume that all projects with many dependencies are upgrading 
their JDK slowly. Because you obviously need all your dependencies to 
support the new JDK. Which means that the JDK is necessarily the last 
thing to update.

With our project we have hundreds of dependencies, some quite critical 
like wildfly or hibernate which are not always just drop-in upgrades. 
And of course everything needs to be validated. And on top of that, all 
build tools need to work with the new JDK as well. In our company there 
are dozens of in-house tools that generate code or inspect generated 
classes.

So I really would like to see a conservative approach for minimum JDK 
requirements. Upgrading the JDK is a huge expense both in time and 
money, so we are doing it for LTS versions only. We are still on JDK-11, 
the switch to JDK-17 should be done in the next 2-3 months for our main 
product.

We might be an outlier and I get there are many smaller projects that 
can easily upgrade their dependencies. But in my opinion libraries 
really should only ever have LTS versions as requirements.


-Thomas



On 20/07/2022 20:13, Matthias Bläsing wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Mittwoch, dem 20.07.2022 um 15:40 +0300 schrieb Nir Lisker:
>> The idea that an LTS JDK version is a good jumping point relies on
>> the assumption that users upgrade their JDK slowly (once every 2-3
>> years), but their JavaFX fast (once every 6 months). That is, they
>> want LTS for their JDK but not for their JavaFX.
> 
> a use-case where the assumption holds, that the JDK is slow being
> updated, but OpenJFX can be updated are projects relying on installed
> JDKs.
> 
> Apache projects can't bundle the JDK (it contains libraries with
> licenses less liberal than ALv2). The JDK is hard to install with JDK
> methods, so it needs to be "there". OpenJFX can be installed at runtime
> and thus can be more or less trivially installed with JDK tools.
> NetBeans for example currently bundles (as in has provisions to install
> JavaFX with downloads from maven central) it.
> 
> Before you say it, yes you can create installers, that install the JDK
> at runtime, but they are a PITA and running from ZIP is just
> convenient.
> 
> Just my thoughts
> 
> Greetings
> 
> Matthias