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Java is still available at zero-cost

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Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#81

Post by MBCook »

scarface74 wrote: post #57
projektir wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your preferred alternative to Java is?

.Net Core. It’s maintained by a company that actually knows how to support a platform.

Because Java has had such a terrible support record. And it’s not like Oracle has any products they support.

Microsoft has quite a history of creating and then abandoning different APIs and technologies.

This is all pointless hyperbole. This isn’t that big change in the Java ecosystem. It’s not like it’s going to cost $20 to run Java at all.

The price is for running Oracle’s Java... that’s older than six months... that you want security updates for.

You can run a different JVM, you can get the security patches from someone else, you can go without them. You can pay someone other than Oracle. Free options still exist.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#82

Post by scarface74 »

flukus wrote: post #55
scarface74 wrote: post #9

Just for comparison.... Microsoft supports .Net Core LTS releases for three years.... https://www.microsoft.com/net/support/policy

Did they learn the definition of "long term support" from phone manufacturers? .net 1.1 (I looked this up when I had to install it earlier this week...) was supported for 10 years until 2013 and as part of Windows Server 2003 (32 bit) it was supported until 2015 so it looks like they're going backwards too.

.Net Core (open source) and .Net Framework (Windows Only) have different support policies.

.Net Framework has a much longer support lifecycle.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq...

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#83

Post by scarface74 »

MBCook wrote: post #81
scarface74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.Net Core. It’s maintained by a company that actually knows how to support a platform.

Because Java has had such a terrible support record. And it’s not like Oracle has any products they support. Microsoft has quite a history of creating and then abandoning different APIs and technologies. This is all pointless hyperbole. This isn’t that big change in the Java ecosystem. It’s not like it’s going to cost $20 to run Java at all. The price is for running Oracle’s Java... that’s older than six months... th…

Microsoft is known for s lot of things, but breaking backwards compatibility and short term support aren’t two of them.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#84

Post by latchkey »

MBCook wrote: post #35

I have a friend working at a company that is having “very important” discussions about this. They need to keep up with security patches (for obvious reasons) but the six month limit has them scared. The consensus seems to be that they don’t believe they can keep up with an upgrade schedule that fast and are thus forced to pay for support from someone or hope that the community backports security fixes far enough for…

Waiting 6 months also does not make much sense when it comes to security patches. It seems like spending time to engineer processes to allow faster upgrades (CI/CD deployments is one popular route), would be a worthwhile investment.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#85

Post by jamie_ca »

peanutz454 wrote: post #49
euske wrote: post #43

Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…

Imagine you are a software developer that sells a hospital management system built on Java. You need to prove your software is built on secure technology. So if you are using Java 11, and suppose it is known that there are no more security updates, you cannot claim security. What I understand from the article - Oracle is not supporting it Oracle 11 after 6 months, but other still will, so nothing to worry about.

> Imagine you are a software developer that sells a hospital management system built on Java

Then you're probably earning enough to pay Oracle for continued support. 6mo is just the no-cost timeframe.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#86

Post by eftychis »

cdoxsey wrote: post #46
euske wrote: post #43

Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…

With Go: every release. Free performance improvements and backwards compatibility. It also doesn't require anything installed on the server, so it's just updating a ci script.

Go is kind of special, as it is new relatively and the initial implementation of every feature is usually the most basic possible. Thus, every new version there is space for a lot of improvements. What I mean: the garbage collector is/was for all intents and purposes Dijkstra's late 70s ('78) tricolor algorithm.

They eliminated re-scanning of the stack on Go 1.7 by adding a hybrid write barrier which is 90's work (found the proposal: https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/17503-...). So Go is by no means state-of-the-art performance wise. That is not bad and has its benefits, one of them being that you can improve with every release.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#87

Post by no_wizard »

One could argue that LTS software is just a trap (and a particularly lucrative one). I know that this is likely a couple factors that allow me to say this namely

1. I can rule over our dependency and technology choices with an iron fist if need be

2. I live in on post 3.6+ Python as our main language and for anyone with good CD/CI you can always run your tests against the master branch and latest dev builds at least one or two versions ahead

Okay so with that said, I feel like LTS versions of software are a trap for this reason. You end up in situations where there is so much pain with upgrading that you end up spending more either more time slogging through incompatibilities in the upgrade pipeline the longer you put it off the worst this gets, or you end up in situations where you have to maintain a forked Verizon’s if the code base while you upgrade things or you have to do a lot of monkey patching and work around to just get things running (famously this is the approach GitHub used to upgrade from different versions of Rails)

The alternative is to pay money to companies that will maintain the version of what you are using, but even then you inevitably have to move forward and that leads to nasty vendor lock in

I personally believe that having a robust CD/CI platform and a well tested code base allows you to by pass this whole charade. We always have our code tested against the next next incremental release in testing, the next versions dev branch and a rolling git pull and build that tests our code base. We really do expect things to break but it lets us plan with our working code quite accurately to avoid this problem altogether and now we largely update pretty close to release cadence.

I don’t know if this helps anyone but I suggest doing software development in this fashion will save you a ton of headache. Being up to date with rolling release strategies has helped our productivity immensely because we can think about our dependencies and we have really whittled down to just a few core ones l. At a certain point we also formed some of the smaller ones and find maintaining those ourselves has been a flawless experience

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#88

Post by no_wizard »

euske wrote: post #43

Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…

We upgrade rolling release style all the time.

New features can make us very productive and honestly I don’t regret the aggressive approach

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#89

Post by cwyers »

no_wizard wrote: post #87

One could argue that LTS software is just a trap (and a particularly lucrative one). I know that this is likely a couple factors that allow me to say this namely 1. I can rule over our dependency and technology choices with an iron fist if need be 2. I live in on post 3.6+ Python as our main language and for anyone with good CD/CI you can always run your tests against the master branch and latest dev builds at least…

Not upgrading your dependencies in-line with upstream is a form of perverse technical debt -- perverse because most technical debt is incurred to get new features/releases quicker, whereas the technical debt from not upgrading is incurred to simply stay where you are.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#90

Post by gear54rus »

shados wrote: post #66
euske wrote: post #43

Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…

In the JavaScript world people use those holiday chocolate calendar things to count the days until a new version of their favorite compiler will come out and can't sleep the night before because they want to be sure they can update at the very instant the release is dropped (and then proceed to complain that their favorite framework didn't update for the quirks of the new compiler in a timely manner). I wish I was co…

Yep, and that's why JS is moving and everyone else is biting the dust lol.

Progress needs to be made and those who can't follow don't have the right to complain really. Old tools are always available because language compatibility is preserved (which, imo should also be dropped, we would have much better language as a result).

We also stick to LTS (in my case node LTS)

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