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Which version of JDK should I use?

whichjdk.com

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Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#91

Post by hiram112 »

Thank you for this.

I've seen, over the past few years, at least a dozen large threads on HN, Reddit, Slashdot, and elsewhere arguing over the JDK.

Usually they're a passionate mix of developers and PMs claiming they're still very confused by the licensing and update / security fix terms since JDK 8, while various Oracle engineers then shout back that the licensing issues are straight forward.

Personally, I've developed with Java for over a decade, and I have never really understood when I should use one version or the other. Oracle, Eclipse Foundation, IBM, and the other big players have not done a good job of marketing the various offerings, nor have they done a good job of clarifying for engineers what they should be installing on their local machines, development and test servers, production, etc.

This is probably the clearest fact sheet I've seen yet, and the links to different distributions with a concise "Use / Don't Use..." rating is indispensable.

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#92

Post by pron »

fwip wrote: post #54
pron wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest, cheapest choice for applications that are heavily maintained is to use the most recent version. LTS is designed for legacy applications that are no longer heavily developed, and might benefit from security and bug fixes only (note that this model is new; in the past, back when there were major versions, minor updates included both patches and big features).

It also depends on your target environment, and how much control you can exert over the machine where your software will run. Sometimes you're creating an app that other users need to run in their own environments - and in that case, targeting "latest LTS" is safer, as they may have requirements on what they can run that you don't.

True, there are, indeed, times when you can't use the current version, but note that Java applications are now encouraged to bundle their own runtime (generated with jlink).

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#93

Post by exabrial »

twic wrote: post #5

I'd like to see more of a rationale for not using Corretto on non-AWS servers. What's wrong with it?

Not sure. The JDK works pretty well, but for whatever reason, I had issues with Corretto crypto provider and running it with Metabase. Switched to Adopt and didn't look back

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#94

Post by virtue3 »

KronisLV wrote: post #90
spiralpolitik wrote: post #9

The general guidance is always use the last LTS release unless there is a specific feature in the non LTS releases that you can’t wait for. So any new development should target 17 at this point. Unless you want serious long term pain then you shouldn’t be more than one LTS release behind. So if you are not running on JDK 11 or later you should be strongly thinking about upgrading.

Currently upgrading a ~1M SLoC Java enterprise app (with regular Spring, Jetty in there, scheduled processes, PrimeFaces for web UI, REST API services, SOAP services, the whole shebang) from Java 8 to Java 11 (since 17 wasn't out when that change was approved) and it's largely proving to be a pain. Since the version of Spring is ancient and changes over to Spring Boot were also approved, now have to rewrite parts of…

I think this is one of the few benefits of micro service architectures. You end up with much smaller pieces to migrate over. And if the service is well defined and you have ample logging for endpoints you actually could re-write it.

Mind you; you usually end up with the services all in different states of node/jdk/etc versioning(at least the companies I worked at).

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#95

Post by flatiron »

mayli wrote: post #72
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting about a Adoptium, since that’s the recommended JVM in the article.

I was using adopt jdk since that's much easier to download the jdk (especially jre) for Windows and Linux. The new Adoptium didn't git a jre build, which is sad :(

Honestly if you are using Linux you should be using the distros Java.

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#96

Post by AmpsterMan »

Decabytes wrote: post #65

I’ve tried more than once to learn Java I find it very confusing. This website resolves one of the issues. The other issue I have is that most Java tutorials use IntelliJ, or some other IDE, which makes it difficult to figure out what a non IDE workflow actually looks like, some managing dependencies is confusing. I wonder if c# and mono is better in this respect

What programming language are you comfortable with? I'd say syntactically Java is fairly simple and at least superficially similar to C/C++. Environment wise, it's definitely very large and oriented toward "powerful but complex" rather than "simple and orthogonal". For build and dependency management systems, Gradle or Maven are your tools. I personally prefer Gradle since it uses a programming language for it's configuration, rather than xml.

There is definitely a lack "end-to-end" tutorials that don't rely on some form of tooling support. I would love to see more content on how to make a Java program with nothing but an editor and a command line, but I suspect there isn't much of a need for that. Java's tooling is exceptionally good, it's libraries mature and robust. Part of the reason every tutorial out there uses an IDE is because through quirks of history Java is basically an Enterprise programming environment where "Build the Right Thing" predominates over "Worse is Better".

EDIT: There is a REPL included with each JDK after 9 called JShell. It's useful if you just want to get up to speed or if you want to test something quickly.

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#97

Post by zylepe »

mayli wrote: post #72
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting about a Adoptium, since that’s the recommended JVM in the article.

I was using adopt jdk since that's much easier to download the jdk (especially jre) for Windows and Linux. The new Adoptium didn't git a jre build, which is sad :(

The jre is deprecated in favor of jlink, they have an explanation here: https://blog.adoptium.net/2021/10/jlink-to-produce-own-runti...

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#98

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #36
PaulKeeble wrote: post #8

It really is quite incredible what a mess has made of the clear stability of Java and what to get since Oracle took over.

When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring. Since then, Oracle completely open-sourced the JDK and the associated tools and gave the the compatibility kits to the community to use. The result is that there are now several different distributions of the JDK. This is undeniably a good thing. As to the 6-month re…

> When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring.

Sun went several years without releasing a new major version, but that same page lists frequent minor updates. So yes, I would call that exactly a stability to treasure.

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#99

Post by rococode »

These recommendations are pretty arbitrary and don't even attempt to scratch the surface of what is actually materially different between the JDKs. Don't use Corretto outside of Amazon... why? Don't use Dragonwell because... China bad? Use Red Hat OpenJDK if you're running on Red Hat servers, Microsoft OpenJDK if you're on Azure, SapMachine if you're on SAP, because... the name matches so that's nice? At least they're consistent on that point. There are (generally pretty niche) reasons to pick specific distros, but those reasons certainly aren't discussed here.

I feel like the actual decision process is fairly straightforward in nearly all cases:

- Use whatever vendor happens to be most convenient to install. If nearly everyone using your OS is installing Java one way, and you're installing it some other unusual way, you should be crystal clear about why exactly you need to do that.

- Generally go with JDK 11, if you may have to deal with older software then maybe go with 8, if you want the shiny new stuff and don't mind some extra hassle then go with JDK 17 (it's not well-supported by everything yet).

That's pretty much it. There are exceedingly few cases where it actually matters whether you installed Corretto or Oracle OpenJDK, and in those cases you'll likely end up either testing all the JDKs anyway to make your decision or writing your own patches for whatever you need.

Re: Which version of JDK should I use?

#100

Post by krzyk »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #28
spiralpolitik wrote: post #9

The general guidance is always use the last LTS release unless there is a specific feature in the non LTS releases that you can’t wait for. So any new development should target 17 at this point. Unless you want serious long term pain then you shouldn’t be more than one LTS release behind. So if you are not running on JDK 11 or later you should be strongly thinking about upgrading.

There is more to this now tho, because even their topline recommendation misses the fact that Temurin (anagram of runtime) only provides a small subset of tested builds you need. They are in there but easy to miss - Bellsoft actually have builds for both jdks and jres for more than mainstream x86_64. Termurin dont even have jres anymore (last time I checked) https://bell-sw.com/pages/downloads/#/java-17-current

Are JREs still a thing (they were removed from Oracle builds in JDK 9)? Those were mostly for applets or JWS.

Nowadays no one keeps just one JRE in their laptop/desktop and disk sizes are in TBs so no point in saving 100 MB and lacking development tools.

And in one targets containers or systems with small amount of disk jlink give more gains than JRE.

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